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.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
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.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.