By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“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.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. 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. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.