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.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. 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.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. 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. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.