Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. 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. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. 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. 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. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. 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. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.