"Nothing you need to—" Ow. "—get worked up about," he says, which is advice as much as cheek.

The real answer is: a cocktail of paralytics and incapacitating agents, slow-working by necessity, because combining enough poisons to sidestep a target's potential overachievement in the field of mithridatism would make them lethal if they all hit at once or hit too strongly. But they'll work a bit faster if someone insists on wriggling. Or kicking.

But it means his job is done, more or less. He doesn't let go of his daggers. He isn't that stupid. But he does hold them up a little, fingers loose, in a suggestion of surrender.