Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
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.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. 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. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.