The city of Ashenmere did not care that Dante Caelum was suffering inside it.
Ashenmere in the fever months ran on its own particular madness, a breathing labyrinth of smoke and copper bells and the smell of thornroot broth bubbling in clay vats before the first light touched the canal water. Skiff-runners threaded between market crowds with the unhurried confidence of people who had never once imagined the concept of yielding. Essence traders appeared from archway shadows like condensed mana given commercial ambition. Everything in Ashenmere moved. Everything in Ashenmere perspired freely and without shame.
Dante did not perspire. He had decided at some point in his early years that this was simply not something that would be happening to him.
He sat at an outdoor table on Tallow Wharf looking like a creature the climate had submitted a formal complaint about, pale and angular and conspicuous in the way that only the deeply miserable ever managed to achieve. He was fourteen years old, dressed in grey silkweave that would have looked excessive on most people and looked merely considered on him, and he had the kind of face that made grown adults uncertain whether they were about to be helped or assessed and found wanting.
Across the table, Sable Kren pretended to read the chalkboard menu propped against the teahouse wall.
Sable was twenty years old and built like someone had commissioned a person with very generous specifications, all broad shoulder and heavy jaw and hands that looked as though they belonged to a man twice his size and twice his age. He had answered Dante's posting eight months ago on a procurement board that circulated through the quieter guildhalls of the Deepvein Network, and in those eight months he had never once done anything so personally undignified as visibly sweat. In this one respect they were alike. In most everything else, the differences were considerable.
"He's late," Dante said.
"By five minutes," Sable replied without looking up from the chalkboard.
"Five minutes is late and I hold this position with conviction, and I am not interested in discussing it."
Sable set down the small wooden board with the easy slowness of someone demonstrating that the pace of the world was a thing they had personally negotiated. Whether this was genuine composure or a very practiced performance, Dante had not yet reached a satisfying conclusion. "Fenwick will show. He's reliable."
"You said that about Darro."
A silence moved in between them and settled like silt at the bottom of a slow river.
"Darro was reliable," Sable said, choosing his words carefully, "right up until the point where he wasn't."
Right until he wasn't was the charitable framing of what had happened in the Saltmere Passage. The honest accounting involved a falsified guild seal, twenty-three days of moving between safe houses in the merchant district, and Dante's right hand immobilized in a splint brace for two weeks while a healer with mediocre mana affinity did what she could. He rolled his fingers against his knee now, not from any remaining discomfort but from the habit the injury had left behind, checking that each one still answered, that the fundamental agreement between intention and body remained in effect.
A server appeared at the edge of their table.
Except.
Dante looked at the man's boots first. Then at his hands. Then at his collar and the way it sat with a precision that no garment retained after a full morning of actual service work in this heat.
"Sit down," Dante said.
The server looked at him with polite confusion, then shifted his gaze toward Sable, because Sable was obviously the adult, the responsible figure, the person whom any sensible man would direct his attention toward in a situation involving a table, two patrons, and a question about tea.
Dante pressed two fingers to the table surface.
"Your boots are canal-leather with hand-stitched reinforcement along the toe, which places their cost at roughly three times what this teahouse pays in a week. The callus pattern across your right palm comes from grip work, not tray carrying. The server's apron you're wearing has a fold crease across the lower left panel that means it was taken from storage within the last hour and has never been used for actual service. And you have circled this wharf twice in the past fifteen minutes, which I established by tracking the same amber-sail skiff making the canal loop, and you have outpaced it both times."
The man they had been briefed to expect as Fenwick Holst allowed the performance to come apart slowly, the way a well-constructed facade comes apart, piece by reluctant piece. His shoulders dropped from their professional elevation. His posture rearranged itself from courteous hospitality into something more candid and a great deal more anxious.
"Extraordinary," he said, just above a murmur.
"Not especially. A borrowed apron is not a uniform." Dante indicated the vacant chair. "Sit down. Pour yourself some tea if your hands need something to occupy them."
Fenwick sat. He reached for the clay teapot with fingers that demonstrated a slight but unmistakable tremor.
"I should brief you on the current situation," Dante said, placing a slim resonance-recorder on the table, a polished obsidian chip no larger than a thumb that would capture every word spoken within arm's reach. "I am carrying nothing. Sable, however, has a condensed-bolt pistol in his shoulder harness, two ironwood throwing blades in his boot sheaths, a single-charge disruption piece fitted inside his left cuff, and three concussion spheres distributed across the inner pockets of his coat. Anything I've overlooked?"
"The impact weight," Sable said, in a tone that suggested he was discussing the weather.
"The impact weight. Lead-core, stuffed inside his waistband on the right side." Dante folded his hands on the table. "None of this should concern you, Mister Holst. None of it is intended for use against you."
Fenwick had achieved the particular pallor of someone whose blood had received a very direct message about relocating elsewhere.
"What I mean," Dante added, in the same unhurried voice, "is that Sable doesn't require any of his equipment to be a serious problem for someone. The weapons are more of a formality at this point."
Sable produced a pleasant, open smile from somewhere in his expression, and it made the situation measurably worse.
Fenwick Holst had heard the name Caelum before. Anyone who moved through the serious levels of the acquisition trade heard it eventually, attached to cautionary stories about a family that worked the borderland between legitimate relic recovery, intelligence brokerage, and the kind of consulting that didn't put itself on documents. He had prepared himself for the senior Caelum, for a seasoned operator somewhere in his middle years who would be controlled, professional, and quietly intimidating.
He had not prepared himself for a pale, thin boy of fourteen who deployed the vocabulary and authority of someone who had spent a lifetime in rooms where everyone else was already deferring to them, who examined Fenwick with eyes the color of overcast sky as though he were a cipher that had already been three-quarters solved.
"Now then," Dante said, nodding toward the resonance chip. "You responded to our inquiry."
Fenwick straightened in his chair and reminded himself, firmly, of the commission figure they had agreed upon. "Yes. The thing you're looking for, I have a lead on its location."
"Do you." The words arrived without any upward inflection at all. "And what exactly am I supposed to base that trust on? You could be arranging a collection on behalf of someone with a longstanding interest in my family's continued difficulties."
Beside Dante's left ear, a duskfly completed a brief and ill-considered approach. Sable intercepted it from the air with two fingers and set it aside without any apparent shift in attention.
"No, listen," Fenwick said quickly, one hand already moving toward his coat. "I have proof. Here, look at this."
He produced a capture-print, the kind pressed from a mana-etched plate, and placed it flat on the table between them.
Dante looked at it. He concentrated carefully on maintaining his breathing at its normal cadence, on keeping the precise structure of his expression exactly where he had put it. The image showed a hand emerging from layered shadow, fingers slightly open, curved upward as though presenting something to whoever stood above them. The skin of the hand was the wrong color for any person Dante had encountered in his fourteen years of methodically cataloguing the world. It was not the color of sickness or cold or death. It was a deep, uneven green, textured at the knuckles like stone pulled from a riverbed, and it represented something that the entire published canon of cultivator scholarship and bestiary documentation had conspicuously failed to account for.
Somewhere beneath the careful architecture of Dante's composure, something shifted. Something that resembled, uncomfortably and against his better judgment, the sensation of hope. He had a long-standing practice of treating hope with professional suspicion.
He placed the capture-print back on the table.
"Explain," he said.