Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
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.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.