By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
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.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.