By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. 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. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. 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. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.