By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
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.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.