He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
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.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.