Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.