Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
“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.”
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.