The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.