There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.