Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. 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. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. 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. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.