There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. 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. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.