There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.