The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“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. 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 old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.