The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. 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.”
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.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.