The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.