The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
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.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. 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. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.