He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
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.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
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.
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.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.