By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. 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.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. 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. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.