The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
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.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
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.
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.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.