Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. 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. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. 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. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.