By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. 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. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
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.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. 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. 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.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.