He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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 junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
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.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“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.”
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.