He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.