Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. 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. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“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.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.