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.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.