Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. 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 estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.