The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. 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. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.