By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
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.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. 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. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.