Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. 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.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“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.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.