He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.