Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
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.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
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 technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.