Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.