He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. 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. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.