Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.