There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
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.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. 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. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
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.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. 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. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.