There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.