The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. 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. 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. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.