Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. 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. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
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.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. 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. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.