Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. 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 array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.