Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. 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. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
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.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.