Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
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.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.