He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
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.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.