The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
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.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. 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. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.