He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
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.
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.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. 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. 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 put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.