Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. 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 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. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. 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. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
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.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.