Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
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.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.