Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.