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.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“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. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
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.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.