The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.