He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
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 estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.