The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.