Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.