The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. 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. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“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. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.