The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.