The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. 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. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.