Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“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. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.