He needed three things he couldn't buy legally.
The first was a formation anchor, pre-Sovereign grade, which hadn't been manufactured in three hundred years and couldn't be faked because the alloy composition required materials the Assembly had quietly stopped making available to independent craftsmen about a century after the founding. You could find them occasionally in estate sales, old family vaults, the kind of collection assembled by a great-grandparent who'd traveled widely and asked few questions. They were expensive, irregular in supply, and technically required registration with the sect's artifact bureau if you wanted to purchase one through official channels.
The second was a set of qi suppression beads, the military grade variety, not the common type sold in cultivation supply shops but the kind with a sixteen-layer matrix that could hold a signature flat for six hours without recharging. The common type lasted forty minutes. He needed six hours minimum for what he was planning.
The third was a translation lexicon for pre-Sovereign technical script, specifically the engineering dialect, which differed from the literary dialect he'd been working from and was making certain sections of the western wall close to unreadable. The lexicons existed. The Assembly kept them in restricted archives. Copies occasionally surfaced in the private market at prices that reflected how much the Assembly wanted them not to.
He needed all three of these things without leaving a purchase record anywhere that could be traced back to a herb vendor in Ashfen's lower district.
Ox gave him a name.
The name was Rou.
Just Rou, no family name offered or apparently in use. She operated out of a storage unit in the warehouse district that was registered as a textile import business and did not, Ox had said with the expression of a man relaying information he found personally baffling, appear to contain any textiles.
He went on a Wednesday afternoon.
The storage unit's front door was unlocked. He knocked anyway, because walking into unlocked spaces without knocking was how people got things thrown at them.
"It's open," said a voice from somewhere inside.
He went in.
The space was large and it was full. Not cluttered exactly, more like extremely densely organized by a system that made sense to its owner and to nobody else. Shelves from floor to ceiling on three walls, every shelf packed with components, slips, sealed containers, formation boards, tools he recognized and several he didn't. The smell of metal and old qi and something faintly herbal that he couldn't immediately identify.
In the middle of it, sitting cross-legged on a workbench with a formation board in her lap and a magnifying lens strapped to her head, was a woman who appeared to be in her mid-twenties and was wearing what had probably once been a sect uniform, now missing both sleeves and most of its formal structure, and was making a very small and very precise adjustment to something on the board with a tool that was technically a dental instrument.
She didn't look up.
"Formation components on the left, artifacts on the right, slips in the back. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you if I have it." A pause. "Don't touch anything."
"I'm looking for three specific items," Yevhan said. He listed them.
She looked up.
She had sharp eyes behind the magnifying lens, which gave her the momentarily alarming appearance of someone with one very large eye and one normal one. She flipped the lens up. Both eyes were dark and bright and currently assessing him with the frank directness of someone who had decided long ago that social preamble was a waste of time.
"Pre-Sovereign formation anchor," she said. "Qi suppression beads, military grade. Engineering dialect lexicon." She tilted her head. "That's not a shopping list. That's a project."
"That's what I need," he said.
"What's the project."
"Private."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she went back to the formation board and made another small adjustment. "I have the beads. Military grade, sixteen-layer, good for eight hours not six, I upgraded the matrix on a batch last month. I have two translation lexicons, one's a copy which is better than the original because the original is water-damaged and I filled in the missing sections from a secondary source." A pause. "The anchor I'd have to check."
She set down the board and the dental tool and slid off the workbench in one motion, moving through the space with the specific ease of someone who had navigated it ten thousand times. She disappeared behind a shelf unit. He heard things being moved.
He looked at the shelves nearest him. Pre-Sovereign components, she'd said, on the left. He looked at them with the part of him that had spent years studying this material and recognized, on the third shelf from the top, a set of formation connectors he'd spent six months looking for two years ago and given up on finding.
He was looking at them when something moved at his right side and he felt his coat pocket lighten by approximately the weight of his emergency spirit coin.
He didn't react.
She came back around the shelf with a small wooden box and set it on the workbench. "I have one anchor. Good condition. The matrix is intact, I checked it last month."
"How much for all three," he said.
She named a price. It was high but not unreasonable, the kind of price that acknowledged the risk of the inventory rather than trying to exploit the buyer. He respected that.
"I'll take everything," he said. "Including the formation connectors on the third shelf."
She paused. "I didn't mention those."
"No," he said.
She looked at him. Then at the shelf. Then at him again with the expression of someone recalibrating.
"You know what those are," she said.
"Yes."
"Most people don't."
"I'm not most people."
She looked at him for a long moment with an expression that had stopped being assessment and started being something more like interest. The professional kind, the kind that happened when you found an unexpected peer in an unexpected place.
"The coin," she said.
He held out his hand. She put it back in his palm without looking embarrassed about it, which he found he liked. No performance of contrition, just the clean transaction of someone who had been caught and was moving on.
"Reflex," she said.
"I know. You did it twice more while you were at the shelves."
She stopped. "Did I get anything."
"No. I moved them."
She processed this. Then the corner of her mouth moved upward, quick and involuntary, the expression of someone who had found something funny against their will. "Alright," she said. "What's your name."
"Gu Yun."
"That's not your name," she said, with the breezy certainty of someone stating a thing they couldn't possibly know for certain and were confident about anyway.
He looked at her.
"Nobody named Gu Yun knows what pre-Sovereign formation connectors are on sight from across a room," she said. "And nobody named Gu Yun needs military grade qi suppression for eight hours." She started wrapping the components. "You don't have to tell me. I'll still sell to you. I'm just noting that you have a fake name and an interesting project and I'm a person who finds interesting projects interesting."
"Noted," he said.
She wrapped everything with the efficient speed of someone who had done a great deal of discreet packaging and handed it to him. He paid. She took the money and put it somewhere in the depths of the storage unit without counting it, which either meant she trusted his count or she planned to count it later and hunt him down if it was wrong.
He suspected the latter.
He was at the door when she said: "The anchor. The matrix is calibrated for single-path input. If you're running anything more complex you'll need to recalibrate it before use."
He stopped.
"The recalibration process for multi-path integration is in section seven of the lexicon," she continued, with the even tone of someone making a factual observation. "The copy I gave you has that section intact. The original doesn't."
He turned around.
She was back on the workbench, magnifying lens down, dental tool in hand, looking at the formation board.
"I haven't said anything about multi-path integration," he said.
"No," she agreed.
"Why did you mention it."
She made a small adjustment to the board. "Because you need to know it's in there and I'd rather you use what you're buying correctly than come back here because something went wrong."
He looked at her for a moment. She didn't look up.
"Professional pride," she said. "I have a reputation for reliable inventory."
He left.
He walked three blocks before he checked his other coat pocket, the inner one, the one he kept the rubbing papers in.
Empty.
He stopped in the middle of the lane.
He went back through the sequence of the visit in his head. She'd been behind the shelf unit. He'd been looking at the formation connectors on the left. His hands had been at his sides. He had not felt anything.
He stood in the lane for a moment with the specific feeling of a man who has just realized he underestimated something.
Then he turned around and went back.
She was still on the workbench.
She looked up when he came in. Her expression was neutral in the way of someone who had expected this.
"The papers," he said.
She reached into her own inner pocket and produced them. Held them out. He crossed the space and took them.
She'd unrolled one. He could tell from the slight change in the curl. She'd read enough to know what she was looking at.
"Pre-Sovereign wall script," she said. "Engineering dialect. From a structure of significant size based on the notation density."
He said nothing.
"You're not going to tell me what it is," she said.
"No."
She nodded slowly, the nod of someone accepting a boundary they don't fully agree with. "Alright." A pause. "The anchor calibration. If you need help with it, the multi-path recalibration is technically straightforward but easier with a second set of hands. I'm available."
"Why," he said.
She looked at him directly. The bright sharp eyes, no lens now, just her.
"Because," she said, "whatever you're doing with pre-Sovereign anchors and engineering dialect wall scripts and military grade qi suppression is the most interesting thing to walk into this storage unit in two years. And I have been extremely bored."
He looked at her.
She looked back without flinching, without performing, without the careful management he was used to from people who wanted something from him. Just the direct uncomplicated honesty of someone who had decided the most efficient thing was to be exactly what they were.
He thought about Shou Pei. About forty years alone with a secret. About the rubbing papers in his inner pocket and the archive breathing in the dark and a timeline that had just gotten shorter.
He thought about the fact that he'd been completely outpocketed by someone he'd been specifically watching.
"I'll let you know," he said.
She went back to the formation board.
He left, properly this time, and didn't check his pockets until he was two streets away.
Everything was there.
He wasn't sure whether that was reassurance or a message. Knowing her, probably both.
End of Chapter 12