Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. 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. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.