The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.