By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. 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. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
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.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
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.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.