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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“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. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“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. 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 array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.