The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
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.
“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. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.