The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“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. 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. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.