Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. 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. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.