Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
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.
“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. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
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.
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.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.