The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. 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. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. 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.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.