By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. 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. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
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.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.