The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. 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.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. 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.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
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.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.