By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
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.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.