Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.