The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. 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. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. 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. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.