Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.