The lanterns were all out by the time Clyde made his move.
He lay in bed for a while after they went dark, listening to the house settle into its nighttime quiet, waiting for the specific quality of stillness that meant Luchian had been asleep long enough that nothing short of a fire was going to wake him. When he heard the deep, even breathing from the other room, slow and completely untroubled, he got up.
He dressed quietly. Black coat, dark trousers, the boots that didn't creak on the floorboards when he stepped carefully near the edges. Then he opened his wardrobe and took out the black cloth he had bought from a market stall three days ago without being entirely sure why he was buying it. He knew why now. He folded it and wrapped it around his head and shoulders loosely, enough to break the recognizable shape of his face and hair without looking so deliberate that it attracted attention on its own.
He checked himself in the small mirror above the washbasin.
You look like you're about to do something Aldric would find very disappointing.
He thought about what Aldric had said. The markets are illegal. Ichor materials in the wrong hands. The consequences that followed.
Then he thought about Matrix.
He had never been. Neither had Luchian. Fifty kilometers, which meant a coach, which meant fare both ways, which meant accommodation if they stayed more than a day, which meant planning and saving and all the arithmetic of two people who had always had to do the arithmetic before they could do anything else.
Three hundred shillings would make that a real possibility. Two hundred and sixty would too.
He opened the front door carefully, stepped out into the dark, and pulled it shut behind him with a quiet click.
The place was called the The Veiled Exchange.
He had found it through a chain of carefully indirect questions asked in the right kinds of places over the past two days. A comment to a vendor about rare materials, a question to a street trader about where unusual items moved, each conversation pointed slightly toward the next until he had an address and a time and a rough idea of what to expect.
What he had not entirely expected was the entrance.
A trapdoor in the floor of an abandoned chandler's shop in the oldest part of the canal district, its exterior indistinguishable from every other derelict building on the lane. No sign, no guard visible, just a rusted iron handle set flush with the floorboards that required knowing it was there to find it.
He pulled it open. Creak. Stairs went down into orange lantern light and the sound of voices.
He went down.
The Veiled Exchange occupied a series of connected underground chambers that had clearly been dug and expanded over a long period of time by people with a practical attitude toward structural engineering and no particular interest in making it comfortable. Low ceilings, uneven stone floors, wooden support beams at irregular intervals, the whole space lit by lanterns hung from hooks hammered directly into the stone. The air smelled of metal and leather and something chemical underneath both.
It was busy.
Clyde activated his Hollow Eyes as he moved into the first chamber and kept them at a low output, enough to read frequency signatures without making the violet glow obvious in the lamplight.
The stalls here were nothing like the market stalls above ground. No produce, no fabric, no ordinary goods. Tables covered in cloth displayed weapons, components, sealed vials, cards in protective cases, and materials he had no names for yet. About half the items his Hollow Eyes flagged as carrying Lunar Ichor in some form, the frequency signatures ranging from the clean silver of well-maintained materials to the faintly distorted quality of things that had been sitting unused for a long time.
So the rumors were true. You can buy and sell ichor materials here if you know where to look.
He moved slowly, keeping his expression neutral, his hands in his pockets, taking in the space.
A woman at the nearest stall had an array of small sealed bottles arranged in careful rows, each one containing a liquid of a different color. She was cataloguing them with a quill and a small notebook, her movements precise and unhurried, the movements of someone who took their inventory seriously. She glanced up at Clyde as he passed, assessed him in approximately one second, and went back to her notebook.
Further along, two men were arguing in low urgent voices over a long wrapped object on the table between them, neither of them willing to touch it first, both of them gesturing at it with the kind of careful enthusiasm that suggested the object in question was either very valuable or very dangerous or both.
A teenager sitting cross-legged on a crate in the corner was sorting through a box of what looked like broken card fragments, the remnants of shattered Astral Cards, holding each piece up to the lantern light before either setting it in one pile or dropping it into another. The speed and confidence of the sorting suggested he had done it many times before.
Clyde kept moving.
He found what he was looking for in the third chamber.
An older man sat behind a wide table covered in guns. Flintlocks, revolvers, two longer rifles laid across the back of the display, and in the center of the arrangement, a collection of ammunition that ranged from standard rounds to things that glowed faintly with ichor-infused modifications. The man himself was compact and weathered, somewhere past sixty, with the kind of face that had spent a lot of time outdoors in cold weather and had the lines to prove it. His coat was heavy and practical, his hands thick-fingered and steady, resting on the table with the patience of someone who had been selling things for a long time and understood that patience was part of the transaction.
He looked at Clyde when Clyde stopped in front of the table and did not immediately try to sell him anything, which was itself a kind of professional confidence.
"Looking for something specific?" the old man asked. His voice was low and even, the voice of someone who didn't need to project because the right customers would lean in.
"Maybe," Clyde said. He looked at the modified rounds in the center of the display. His Hollow Eyes confirmed what he suspected, the ichor signatures embedded in the bullets were real, properly infused, the frequency signatures consistent and stable rather than the degraded signatures of shoddily made products. "These are genuine ichor rounds?"
"Every one of them." The old man picked one up and held it between his fingers. "Lunar-infused. Increases penetration against corrupted material. Standard rounds bounce off hardened Howling casing. These don't."
Useful. Genuinely useful.
"How much for a box?"
"Depends on the quantity. Twenty rounds, eight shillings. Fifty rounds, eighteen."
Clyde looked at the display for another moment. Then he looked at the old man directly.
"I have something else I want to discuss. Not a purchase."
The old man's expression didn't change. "I'm listening."
Clyde reached into his inner coat pocket and produced the Echo Ichor card, holding it where the old man could see it without putting it on the table between them.
The old man looked at it. His eyes moved across the surface with the practiced assessment of someone who knew what he was looking at. He said nothing for several seconds.
"Purified?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Who did the purification?"
"A reliable source."
The old man sat back slightly. "Echo Ichor. Phase level of the original bearer?"
"High enough that the card survived intact."
Clang. Somewhere in the adjacent chamber, something metallic hit the floor and a man's voice said something quietly irritated.
"Two hundred and eighty," the old man said.
"Three hundred," Clyde said.
"Two hundred and seventy."
"Two hundred and ninety."
The old man looked at him with a faint expression of amusement. "Two hundred and sixty, and I'll throw in two vials of Lunar Crystal Liquid."
Clyde kept his face neutral while his brain processed this rapidly.
Lunar Crystal Liquid. He's never heard that term before but his Hollow Eyes are already reading the vials the old man has produced from under the table, two small sealed bottles of a pale silver liquid that carries a clean, dense Lunar Ichor signature.
"What does it do?" Clyde asked.
"Restores Lunar Ichor. Small amount per vial, enough to take the edge off a drain when you've pushed too hard." The old man set both vials on the table. "It won't refill you completely but it'll stop you collapsing when you're running low in a bad situation."
That is actually more useful than the extra thirty shillings would be.
"Deal," Clyde said.
Clink. The card changed hands. The old man examined it one more time up close, confirmed the purification was genuine, and counted out two hundred and sixty shillings in a combination of coins that Clyde pocketed without counting in front of him, on the principle that counting money in front of the person who just gave it to you was a particular kind of rudeness.
He pocketed the two vials carefully alongside the coin.
"Pleasure," the old man said, and turned back to his display without further ceremony.
Clyde moved back through the chambers toward the stairs, hands in his pockets, the weight of two hundred and sixty shillings against his hip.
Matrix, he thought. That's actually a real possibility now.
He climbed the stairs, pushed the trapdoor open, and stepped back out into the dark cobalt night of Cristae.
Luchian is going to love it.