The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
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.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.