He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. 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. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.