The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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 junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.