Clarembald de Sorbonne sat in his damp cellar, staring at his failed runic array. His parchment stack was almost gone, and his jars of binding salt were scraped clean.
He didn't panic. He had stopped feeling afraid a long time ago, training himself to treat this emotion like a waste of time. But his plan was wrecked. Without fresh vellum and pure salts, next stage of his research would come to a halt, as his next batch of combat scrolls wouldn't bind. The Academy enforcers were already sniffing around the slums, and this delay meant he would get caught before he could finish his work and prove himself to his arrogant peers. He needed those supplies tonight, or his research, and his life, was over.
He pulled his dusty torn hood over his head, grabbed a small pouch of mixed coins, and slipped out into the foggy black market.
Clarembald was not new to the Underground anymore. He knew well how the underground worked by now, and he had identified the method in its apparent madness and chaos. He started knocking on his usual contacts' doors. But tonight, every single one of them slammed their doors in his face.
He didn't know whether to be shocked, scared, or furious. Every contact gave him the same crazy story- every sheet of high-grade vellum and every ounce of binding salt in the Black market had been bought out in one massive sweep overnight. No one knew who had enough cash to clear the whole market at once, but the stock was gone.
Clarembald felt it in his bones- he was trapped. The Arcane Watch was closing in, his lab was empty, and the black market was bone dry.
Desperate times called for breaking the rules. Clarembald suspected it might be a trap set by the Watch to draw him out, but he had no choice. He was desperate. The black market wouldn't restock anytime soon with the current crisis in Solara, and the borders were about to lock down tight once the foreign dignitaries left. After that, smuggled prices would skyrocket. Before he could afford and arrange new batch of ingredients, the Watch would kick in his safehouse door.
He could track down the mystery buyer on his own earlier, when he was a renowned magister in the Grand Academy of Solara. However now, at his present situation, it was too hard for him; for whoever pulled off a buyout that big ought to be moving like a ghost. But Clarembald knew one basic rule of the underworld- when someone buys up a total monopoly on restricted goods, it always traces back to the top boss running the local money or big loan sharks or the scrupulous middlemen- the agents.
He decided to track down a low-level thug he occasionally bribed and asked him one simple question- who in Solara had the cash and muscle to buy out every scroll component on the black market in a single night?
The thug was at the very bottom of the food chain and didn't know the buyer, but he knew who handled the heavy shadow-finance in the district. He pointed Clarembald straight toward the possible locations,- among which, the Velvet Astrolabe was one.
Clarembald checked each of the locations one by one- and all of them denied him hard. Nobody would even talk to him. His search eventually made him arrive at doorstep of the Astrolabe.
Learning from his past mistakes, he didn't march through the front door this time; he knew the bouncers would just toss a ragged slum-mage like him right back into the mud. Instead, he waited in a dark corner near the entrance as dusk fell. Finally, he spotted a familiar face- a black-market supplier walking out of the building. Clarembald darted out of the shadows and cornered him in the alley behind the tavern. He flashed a rare, volatile magical component he had brewed himself- something too valuable for the thug to ignore.
He traded the reagent just to get a message passed inside to Blanche de Vergy- "A desperate bastard wants to talk to the man you financed last night."
The supplier flashed yellow teeth and went back inside. Clarembald braced himself, expecting the manager's thugs to come out and beat him senseless. At this point however, he barely cared.
After a few minutes, the supplier came back out with the manager's reply- if the scholar ever showed his face near the place again, the manager would lock him in a wine cask and ferment him alive.
The message was crystal clear. Clarembald felt his legs go weak, almost collapsing right there in the dirt. It was his last real hope. He dragged himself back toward his hideout.
As he turned a dark corner in a back alley, he felt a warm breath on his neck. Before he could spin around, a sharp blow cracked against the back of his head, and everything went black.
When he finally came back to sense, he couldn't see a thing, and his head throbbed. For a second, he thought he had gone blind, but he soon realized his eyes worked fine- he was just locked in a pitch-black room. He tested his limbs and found his hands and feet tightly bound to a chair, with a thick gag stuffed in his mouth. A cold draft hit the back of his neck through a hidden window behind him.
He knew exactly what this was. He had been grabbed by the secret arm of the Arcane Watch. They were going to torture him for his research, and then pin some unsolved murders on him, probably the death of the Grand Scholar, and toss him away. After all, it was their classic trick to keep their ledger clean, finding an expandable victim to act as scapegoat to solve every case they could not get hold of the real culprit.
Suddenly, footsteps echoed down the hall. They stopped right outside the door. With a soft click, the door swung open, and three shadowy figures stepped inside.