By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. 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. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
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.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.