Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
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.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
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.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.