The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. 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. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
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.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
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.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.