The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.