There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. 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. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. 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.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.