There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
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.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.