Chapter 27: The Amber Seal
The black market in Vessen District operated in plain sight, with a cover story thin enough to see through if you looked, and thick enough to be plausible if you didn't want to.
It was a salvage auction house. Three nights a week it sold decommissioned Guild equipment, seized artifacts, and estate goods from hunters who hadn't survived their last Gate. During the day it was a warehouse. Between two and four in the morning on alternating Thursdays it was something else.
Jonathan arrived at 1:47 AM. He had the System map every exit, every camera, every face he could see through the upper windows. Then he walked in through the front door.
The man at the desk was enormous, a former C-rank by the look of his shoulders, with a jaw like a shovel and eyes that had seen enough to stop being surprised. He looked at Jonathan.
"Invitation only," he said.
Jonathan slid Seraphina's re-encoded access card across the counter. It came back clean under violet light. The man slid it back.
"Ground floor's for browsing. Basement's for serious buyers. Don't touch what you can't afford."
Jonathan went down.
The basement was larger than the building suggested. Perhaps thirty people browsed in clusters of two and three, speaking quietly. The air tasted of ozone and old energy. To Jonathan's heightened perception it was slightly overwhelming, like trying to hear a single conversation in a room full of static.
He narrowed his focus.
He found the amber seal in the third case from the far wall. A disc of deep amber roughly the size of his palm, mounted between a cracked mana crystal and a ceremonial knife. The dealer had no idea what he had.
Jonathan felt it from three feet away. The counter-frequency resonated against Aethel's seed in his chest like a tuning fork. Not painful, not aggressive. Just precise. A single clean tone against her noise.
He spent another sixteen minutes in the basement, noted the shift change, identified the camera's dead angle beside the service stairs, and bought a minor mana crystal at the front counter to establish a transaction record.
Then he left.
He came back through the ventilation system twenty minutes later.
He was not proud of what he did next.
He took the seal.
He left three times its estimated value in currency inside an envelope behind the case.
On the roof of the building across the alley, he held the amber seal in both hands and let himself feel it properly.
The tuning-fork resonance deepened. Something in his chest, the cold fire, Aethel's seed, recoiled. Not painfully. Warily. The way a predator takes stock of something that might actually be a threat.
He found that very interesting.
He tucked the seal against his sternum.
[ETHELDRIS SUPPRESSION: ACTIVE | 34%]
[VESSEL SYNCHRONIZATION RATE: REDUCED]
[ESTIMATED DELAY: +31 HOURS]
Thirty-one hours.
He had time.
He jumped rooftops going west, moving with a quiet efficiency that no longer required effort. He thought about the Temple of the First Accord. He thought about his mother's breathing, the 4.3 seconds before a coughing fit. He thought, briefly, about Seraphina moving his mug two inches closer to his hand.
He had catalogued it the way the System catalogued everything.
He had not known what to file it under.
He filed it under:
Things I am not thinking about right now.
He kept moving through the dark.