The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. 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. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
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 read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
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.
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.