He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
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.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“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.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
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.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.