He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
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.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.