The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.