He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
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.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.