By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.