Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“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. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.