Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.