By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
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.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. 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. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.