Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“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. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.