The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
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.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. 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. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.