For a long moment the creature said nothing at all.
Then she reached up with both hands and drew the shawl back from her face.
Dante had prepared himself for this. He had spent considerable time preparing himself for this, reviewing every illustration and field sketch and secondhand description that fourteen months of research had assembled into a portfolio he had memorized with the thoroughness he applied to everything he decided was worth memorizing. He had been quite confident that he was ready.
The clarity array in the perception lens rendered her features in its signature green-tinged relief, and they arrived with the particular impact of things that no amount of preparation fully accounts for. Her nose was long and curved at its end like a crescent blade. Her eyes were slit-pupiled and gold, luminous with the kind of light that belonged to creatures who had been accumulating years long before this city had been anything more than a muddy trading post on a canal bank.
Her ears came to distinct points above the line of her shawl. And her skin, which would once have had the deep river-stone quality of the hand in Fenwick's capture-print, had been softened and loosened by the long decades of sweetgrape dependency into something that hung from her sharp features like clay that had never finished drying.
She had been, once, something remarkable. The architecture of that remained, underneath everything the years had done to it.
"If you know about the Codex, human boy," she said, working through the numbing effects of the sweetgrape with visible effort, each word careful and deliberate, "then you know what I carry in this hand. I can end you with a single mana discharge. One intention, one release."
Dante considered this for a moment with his head slightly tilted. "I don't think so," he said. "Look at the state of you. You are barely present. The sweetgrape has been dismantling your mana pathways for longer than I've been alive, and your cultivation base has collapsed to the point where you are healing minor complaints for loose change and sending a runner for your bottles because you cannot maintain a sustained working long enough to retrieve them yourself." He let this sit for precisely the amount of time it needed to. "I am not here to threaten you. I am here to offer you a way out of this lane, in exchange for the Codex."
The gold eyes narrowed further. "What use does a human boy have for the Codex of the Deep People?"
"That is not your concern. Your concern is your available options, which I will now outline."
The pointed ears shifted, a small involuntary movement. The creature was listening despite herself.
"First option. You refuse, we leave, and you remain here until the canal rises and the lane floods again, same as it has for however long you've been sitting in this particular corner of the world."
"Good," she said. "I choose first option."
"You'll want to hear the second one before you commit to that position." Dante held up the ceramic bottle she had just emptied. "What you drank a few minutes ago was not Deepvein vintage. It was well water from a Veinborn sanctified source, drawn from the basin at the root of Fernhollow Ring, sixty meters below the surface, which as I expect you know is one of the most mana-dense natural sites in the northern territories. Sanctified water and sweetgrape are not compatible inside a Veinborn constitution." He paused. "You have perhaps twenty minutes before it begins to feel unpleasant."
The creature stared at the bottle. Then at him. The gold eyes went through several distinct phases, including disbelief, rapid internal calculation, and a fury that briefly made her look very dangerous indeed.
"You have killed me," she said. Very quiet. Very flat.
"That is the first option. Yes."
She pressed both hands against her midsection, tentative, exploratory. "The second."
"You give me the Codex for thirty minutes. In return I give you two treatments, to be administered in sequence. The first counteracts the sanctified water. The second is something I developed with a cultivation pharmacist of my acquaintance. It is a targeted mana-reactive compound that bonds to residual alcohol saturation in the cultivation pathways, breaks it down, and flushes it from the system while simultaneously stimulating meridian regeneration. It is not a comfortable process. But when it is finished, your mana pathways will be open again. Your base cultivation will reassert itself."
The silence that followed this offer was of a different quality than the previous ones. It had more weight to it. More genuine consideration moving through it.
"I could fly again," she said. It was not quite a question.
"You could fly again."
"How am I to trust you? You have already deceived me once this evening."
"That is a fair objection," Dante said, without any defensiveness at all. "Here is my answer to it. I administer the first treatment now, before I have seen the Codex, as a gesture of good faith. The second treatment follows after my thirty minutes. If I do not hold to that, you have seen what sanctified water does to a Veinborn, and you will have the reasonable expectation that I will encounter other Veinborn in my work and they will hear exactly what I did and honor it accordingly." He met the gold eyes steadily. "My family's reputation is a professional asset I am not interested in damaging."
The creature regarded him for a long moment. Then she extended one arm, wrist upward, with the resignation and determination of someone accepting a thing they have decided is necessary.
"I take it," she said.
Sable had the treatment case open before Dante had finished turning toward him. It was a flat reinforced panel that unfolded in two sections, housing two glass vials and a mana-injection rig, an instrument that used compressed cultivated resonance rather than mechanical pressure to deliver treatments subcutaneously without causing unnecessary tissue disruption. He loaded the first vial and passed it to Dante, who crouched beside the creature's extended arm and applied the rig to the inside of her wrist.
The treatment delivered itself with a soft, brief pulse of light beneath the skin. The creature stiffened. Then, after a moment, the lines around her eyes eased very slightly.
"Strong working," she said, almost to herself.
"The pharmacist is very good at what she does. The second treatment will be considerably stronger." Dante returned the rig to Sable and looked back at the creature. "Now. The Codex, please."
What followed was a long period of searching through the inner layers of the shawl, the creature's hands moving through folds of fabric that had accumulated the kind of depth that only years of layered living produced. Dante did not allow himself to breathe at his normal rate during this period. He noticed this, acknowledged it as a physiological response to anticipation, and was unable to do very much about it.
The Veinborn withdrew a closed fist and held it between them.
"No use to you regardless," she said, with a trace of something that might have been satisfaction. "Written in the Deep Script. No human eyes have ever read a word of it."
Dante nodded. He did not trust himself to say anything to this, which was unusual for him, so he said nothing.
She opened her fingers.
Lying in her palm, which was mottled green and knobbly at the knuckles and had reached from alley shadows in a capture-print across fourteen months and four territories and six failed attempts and one fortnight with his hand in a splint brace, was a volume the size of a folded letter. Its covers were hammered copper, darkened with age, and its pages, visible at the edge, were as thin as onion skin and the color of old gold.
Sable took it with both hands and the careful attention he gave to things that warranted it, which was not everything but was this. He opened the compact imaging array at his belt, a mana-stabilized lens that could capture every page at resolution sufficient for detailed reconstruction, and began working through the Codex one leaf at a time. The pages responded to the array's light with a faint luminescence, as though they were accustomed to being read in the dark.
The process took eleven minutes.
When it was finished, Sable uploaded the complete capture to the secure relay on his communications chip and transmitted it to the Morrow estate archive in the northern highlands, where it would be waiting on their return in a sealed partition that only Caelum's mana signature could access. He did not keep information in single locations. He had learned this lesson early and kept it carefully.
Dante returned the Codex to its owner.
"A pleasure doing business with you," he said.
The creature took it back with a possessiveness that had nothing transactional in it. Just something very old being returned to the hands that had carried it for a very long time.
"The second treatment," she said. Not a request exactly. Something firmer than that.
"Of course. I gave my word." Dante looked up at Sable, who was already loading the second vial. "I should tell you, because I believe in adequate preparation, that the purging process is not pleasant to experience. Every residual saturation in your meridians will be expelled at once, and a hundred years of accumulated sweetgrape dependency does not leave quietly."
The creature looked around at the mud and the drainage channels and the half-buried bottles and the lane that had been her entire world for longer than most human families had existed. "You think this is pleasant?" she said.
Sable administered the second treatment into the carotid, the optimal delivery point for anything targeting the primary cultivation pathways.
The effect was immediate and dramatic. The Veinborn woman folded onto her reed mat with a full-body shudder that started at her extremities and moved inward, her frame resonating at a frequency that was audible at the edges of human hearing as a low, continuous hum. The mana pathways opening after decades of compression produced a visible effect, a faint luminescence moving beneath her skin in the pattern of a cultivation network activating from its roots outward.
Dante stood and straightened his silkweave.
"We should leave," he said. "The reconstruction phase will take several hours and the intermediate stages are not something we need to observe."
Sable was already moving. Dante followed him back along the lane, past the reed mat islands and the watching eyes and the narrow walls, back toward the covered market and the canal landing where their skiff was waiting.
He did not speak until they were on the water, moving through the amber-lit reflections of the evening city, the noise of Ashenmere rising and falling around them like something breathing.
Then he took out his communications chip, opened the confirmation receipt from the estate archive, and looked at the small green indicator that meant the complete contents of the Veinborn Codex were sitting in a server in the northern highlands, waiting for him to decode them.
The Kren family had been contracted to the Caelums for four generations. The arrangement had originated, according to the Caelum estate's own historical records, when a traveling cultivator named Aldric Caelum had contracted a guard named Brenn Kren for a crossing through the Thornback Passes, intending a single season's employment. Brenn Kren had stayed for thirty years and his daughter had entered service after him. The Krens trained from the age of eight at a private cultivation institute in the eastern mountain territories, where the curriculum covered close-quarters meridian combat, precision mana-work, emergency cultivation medicine, culinary arts, and information systems management. Those who completed the full program and found themselves between Caelum assignments were, historically, in considerable demand from various noble houses and mercantile dynasties who had specific ideas about what competent protection looked like.
Sable was the current iteration of this arrangement. He sat across from Dante in the skiff's passenger cabin, watching the city go past through the slatted window, and said nothing, which was one of his better qualities.
Dante looked at the confirmation receipt for another moment.
Then he put the chip away and looked out at the water, and permitted himself, quietly and without ceremony, to feel the thing he had been refusing to feel for fourteen months.
It lasted approximately four seconds.
Then he began thinking about what came next.