The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
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.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. 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. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.