Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. 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. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. 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. 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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.