Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.