There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
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.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. 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.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.