Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.