The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“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.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. 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. 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. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.