He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
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.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.