Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.