The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
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.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
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.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.