He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.