Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
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.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
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.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.