Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.