He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“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. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. 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. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“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. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.