There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.