The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
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.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.