Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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 technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.