Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. 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.”
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.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.