He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
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.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
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.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.