Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
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.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. 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.”
“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.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
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.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.