Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.