The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. 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. 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 understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“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. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.