Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
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.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.