Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.