Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. 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. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.