There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.