He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
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.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.