The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“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. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
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.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.