The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.