The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“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. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.