The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. 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. 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. 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. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
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 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.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.