Nobody in the compound slept the night the second bell rang out of turn. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
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.
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.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. 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. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.