By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.