He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.