Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. 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. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“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. 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. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.