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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
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.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
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 did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.