Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
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.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
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.
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.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.