Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
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.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
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.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.