He had been awake for thirty hours, and the numbers on the ledger had begun to move. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
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.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“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. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. 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.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. 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. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.