He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
“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. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.