Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. 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. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“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. 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. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
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.
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.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.