The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“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. 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. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
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.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.