Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. 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.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. 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.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
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.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one 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. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.