Chương 154: Chapter 151. Morning - Part I

Adom was tired. Bone-deep, soul-crushing tired in the way that only came from having your entire day derailed by other people's poor life choices. This morning he'd woken up in a decent mood. He'd been looking forward to his first day as a professor, and had been planning to spend a normal evening at the beach with the boys for the first time in months, and introduce them to Bennu. Simple pleasures. Normal things.

Instead, here he was at a black market auction after midnight, chasing stolen research artifacts while babysitting a changeling spy who'd gotten himself in over his head. Never a dull moment, apparently. The side entrance didn't look like much: a service door in a brick alcove. But when Cass pressed two fingers to a particular brick beside the frame and held them there, the brick warmed under her hand, and somewhere inside the wall a mechanism Adom could feel more than hear turned over and unlatched.

The door swung inward onto a corridor. From the street, the warehouse was one storey of honest grey stone. The corridor went down, a smooth stone throat lit at intervals by recessed mage-lights that brightened as they approached and dimmed behind them, so that the three of them walked always in a small travelling pool of warmth with the dark closing up at their backs. The air also changed as they descended. It was drier, cooler, and threaded with something faintly resinous, incense or old wood.

Adom let a sliver of his senses out along the walls as they went and found what he'd expected: wards, layered everywhere.

"Don't weave anything down here," Cass said quietly, without looking back, as though she'd felt him looking.

"Not even a light. The walls take it personally."

"I noticed."

"I know you did. I'm saying it for him." She tipped her head a fraction toward Jorik, who had gone very still and was keeping to the exact centre of the corridor.

"If you can weave at all that is." The passage turned twice, doglegged around something Adom suspected was a containment vault, and ended at a second door, this one not service-grade at all. Two figures flanked it and one of them looked at Cass, looked at the token she held up between two fingers, and stepped aside without a word, the door opening on its own. And the shabby warehouse turned out to have a secret.

The room beyond was huge — far larger than the building above could hold — and quite luxurious with low fire in a great hearth, deep chairs, a sideboard of bottles, and soft music from nowhere in particular. A handful of people occupied the room, masked, hooded or neither, lounging with drinks. A few glanced over as the door admitted three new arrivals, registered nothing worth their attention, and went back to their conversations.

The man they had come to see was sitting in a tall chair near the hearth, a glass in one hand, and the moment the door opened he set it down and rose. He was tall and narrow, dressed beautifully in dark layered fabric that shifted like the lutin's had, though on him it read as wealth rather than otherness. Silver at the temples, a long clever face, and a smile that arrived early and looked, against all reasonable expectation, genuine.

"Ah," he said, crossing the room toward them with both hands slightly open.

"There you are. I was beginning to worry the passage had eaten you, hahah, it does that occasionally to people it doesn't like. Guildmaster Drake. Always a pleasure." He made a small bow to her.

"And you've brought the gentleman himself."

"Master Verrin," Cass said.

"Thank you for making time."

"For Wangara? Always." His eyes moved to Adom, taking in what little the hood let him see. Then to Jorik.

"And a third. Welcome, all of you. You'll forgive the theatre of the entrance. The clientele likes to feel they've earned their secrets." He raised one hand, barely, and two attendants appeared from the edges of the room as if they'd been waiting for precisely that.

"Your cloaks, please, let them be looked after, you're not in the cold any longer. Sit. You've had, I gather, a long night, and a longer day before it." He was already steering them gently toward the cluster of chairs nearest the fire.

"Virael, the good amber for our guests, and whatever they prefer besides, we have most things, and the things we don't have we can generally find. Are any of you hungry? You look hungry. The tall one looks hungry."

"I'm fine," Adom said, surrendering his cloak to a pair of careful hands and meaning it less than he'd intended; the smell of the orchard-wood and whatever was warming on the sideboard had reminded his stomach, sharply, that he'd skipped dinner and most of the day around it.

"You're not, but I won't press." Verrin's smile deepened by a hair as he settled back into his own chair, arranging the long fabric with an idle grace.

"Sit, sit. Whatever's brought you down my unpleasant little staircase at this hour, it'll go better with a drink in your hand and the weight off your feet. I find almost everything does." The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Verrin looked at Adom a moment longer than the conversation strictly called for. It was then that Adom noticed the others were doing the same. The masked and hooded people had drifted their attention back, careful not to be caught at it.

"You'll forgive them," Verrin said, and made a small gesture toward the room. It was an unhurried motion, almost lazy, but the room answered it at once. The lounging figures rose, gathered their drinks, and filed out through doors Adom hadn't marked on the way in, until the great space held only the four of them and the attendants by the wall. No one protested. No one looked as though protesting had occurred to them.

"It isn't every night," Verrin went on, settling back, "that we have the pleasure of a Magus in our humble little cellar. Of all the things to come down those stairs." His smile turned warmer.

"Congratulations, by the way. On the nomination. Truly. A fine thing for Sundar, and a finer one for the Magisterium; they could do with young blood that's actually worth the title, and from what I hear, you are."

"Thank you," Adom said. Then, because thank you by itself felt thin and faintly lordly, he cast about and added, "You've… a remarkable eye, clearly. The room, the work in the walls. It's well done. Whoever built it knew what they were about." Well, that was shit. Verrin's brows rose a fraction, clearly amused.

"That's kind." he said.

"And I did build it, mostly, so I'll take it twice over." He inclined his head.

"Thank you, Magus." Adom let a breath go.

"If you don't mind, I'd like to get to the heart of the matter."

"Ah." Verrin's smile didn't waver.

"There it is. Straight to business." He turned the glass slowly in his fingers.

"I confess I rather like that. One learns a great deal about a man by how long he's willing to admire the furniture before he says what he came to say. You've good manners, but you don't hide behind them. Good." He set the glass down.

"Two hundred thousand gold." Adom frowned.

"... Pardon me?"

"Two hundred thousand gold," Verrin repeated, without the slightest change in his pleasant tone.

"For the retirement of the items in question. Plus fees, for myself and my people, who have already done the work of preparing them for tonight's floor. Authentication, cataloguing, the courting of buyers — all of it done, all of it owed, whether the lots sell or come quietly off the block." He spread one hand, almost apologetic.

"The goods are yours, Magus. I don't dispute it for a moment, and I'd not sell a man's own property out from under him once he's stood in my house and said it plainly. But the labour was mine. The labour, someone pays for." Two hundred thousand wasn't a number that frightened Adom. He had it, and more besides. But it was still a great deal of gold, and he genuinely couldn't tell whether the fee was fair or whether Verrin had simply named the largest figure he thought a tired Magus might pay without arguing.

So he didn't argue, instead, he looked at Cass. She'd been waiting for it. She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward.

"That's generous of you, Master Verrin," she said.

"Truly. Another house would have let the lots sell and made us chase the buyers across three districts before morning. You didn't, and Wangara will remember that you didn't." There was a small pause, as if the man was waiting for something, then Cass spoke again.

"We'll remember it the next time you need a claim honoured quietly, or a door opened that's usually closed to your trade. Kindness tonight buys kindness later. We're very good at the later." Verrin held her look for a moment, and then he smiled wider than before, and with what looked like real pleasure.

"And that," he said, "is why one always prefers to deal with Wangara." He inclined his head to her, then to Adom.

"Thank you, Guildmaster. You make a man feel his courtesies are an investment rather than a loss. It's a rare gift." He then lifted his glass a fraction.

"The items will be off the floor before the next lot is called. You have my word, for whatever a man in my position's word is worth, and to you, I'd like it to be worth something."

Twenty minutes passed. They waited in the warmth of the great room while Verrin's people saw to the lots, and it was, against all of Adom's expectations for the night, pleasant. The music played on from nowhere he could place. Verrin kept up an easy current of talk that asked for nothing, and the food, once Adom finally gave in to it, was very good: cured meats, dark bread, a dish of olives, and three or four cheeses laid out without ceremony on a board between them.

One of the cheeses was firm and nutty, and Adom thought of Valiant before he'd finished the first bite. The mouse would have adored it. He preferred his cheese exactly like this, firm enough to argue with, and would have lectured the whole table on why the soft ones were a fraud while eating an indecent amount of it. Adom set a second piece aside without quite deciding to, to bring back. Even Jorik had loosened, a little.

He hadn't eaten much, but he'd stopped sitting like a man waiting to be sentenced, and somewhere in the second quarter-hour he'd let his shoulders down. Then, finally, a knock at the far door.

"Come," Verrin said. And they came in carrying cases, several of them, and set them in a row on the low table before withdrawing to the edges of the room. Adom worked the catches on the first one. Inside, bedded in dark cloth, lay the things he'd spent three years and a small fortune bringing into existence. He lifted them out one at a time. Two of the mana-disruptor orbs, twins to the one the bank robbers had carried. A half-finished flight band, its runes only part-cut. A signal stone, a few sealing plates.

And at the bottom of the second case, the one he'd been most afraid to find gone: a squat iron cylinder, unmarked, that could swallow a hostile weave and hold it. He and Kim weren't close to finishing it. It was still the most dangerous thing in the room. He went through them case by case. Jorik leaned in beside him, naming each as it surfaced, confirming, his ears red the entire time.

"That's both orbs," he muttered.

"And the… the band, and the talking stone, that's the pair of them." He caught himself half-apologizing in the middle of it, stopped, jaw tight, and just kept counting. It was a strange sort of penance: the thief reciting back the inventory of his own theft so the man he'd robbed could check the tally. The cases emptied one by one, and the count came up clean. Orbs, band, stone, plates, cylinder. All present. All his. Adom let out a long breath and started to lower the last lid.

"Wait." Jorik had gone still over the open case, his hand hovering above the cloth. Whatever colour the embarrassment had put in his face was draining out of it now.

"There's one missing," he said.