The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“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. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
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.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.