Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.