By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
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.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.