He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
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.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. 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.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.