The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
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.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. 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.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.