By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
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.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
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.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
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.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.