Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.