Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
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.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. 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. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.