The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
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.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.