He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.