Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. 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. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. 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. 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. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. 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. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.