The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“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. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
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.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.