There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. 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. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
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.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
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.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. 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.