Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.