The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.