Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. 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. 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. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
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.
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.
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.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.