The woman worked near the old incense quarter, Fenwick explained, in the shadow of the canal bridges where the street vendors sold bindweed charms and discounted mana-stones of dubious provenance. She traded her services for fermented sweetgrape, and had done so for longer than anyone in that district could reliably remember. She never left. Not for supplies, not for fresh air, not for anything at all. She sent a runner for her bottles and remained in her corner of the world like sediment that had found its permanent resting place.
Dante nodded once. The drinking was consistent with everything his research had turned up. A detail that appeared across three independent sources was a detail worth believing.
He rose from the table, straightening the grey silkweave across his shoulders with two precise movements.
"Then let's not waste the afternoon. Lead the way, Mister Holst."
Fenwick wiped the moisture from his upper lip and looked toward the street with the expression of a man calculating the distance to the nearest exit. "The agreement was information only. That was the full scope of what I agreed to. I want no part of whatever comes next, and I want nothing on my head from the people involved in this."
Sable moved from his chair with the quiet efficiency of something that had spent years learning to make that transition seem casual, and positioned himself just behind and to the right of their contact in a way that was technically not threatening and communicated threat with perfect clarity.
"Mister Holst," Sable said pleasantly, "there was a window in which you had meaningful choices available to you. We have passed that window."
Fenwick went without further argument, which Dante appreciated. Protests were tedious, and he had reached his daily limit sometime during the canal crossing that morning.
Sable had arranged for a covered transport, a reinforced skiff with enclosed passenger quarters and a driver who asked no questions and had the flat, professionally incurious eyes of someone who had learned that not knowing things was the most reliable path to continued employment. It was heavier and slower than necessary for Ashenmere's flat waterways, but Dante preferred to move through the city with as much insulation between himself and the general population as the situation permitted.
The skiff moved at a pace that would have frustrated most people and that Dante simply had to endure, the anticipation building inside his chest with the patient relentlessness of water finding cracks in stone. He had learned to manage this. The hope was the problem, the gradual infectious accumulation of it despite his better intentions. Six times across four different territories, he had arrived somewhere that should have been the end of the search, and six times the end had declined to materialize. He had no particular reason to believe this time was different.
And yet.
The mottled green hand in the capture-print had been exactly the right shade of wrong.
The skiff docked at a narrow landing where the canal met a covered market, and they proceeded on foot into a district that operated at a different density than the rest of Ashenmere, tighter and louder and smelling strongly of frying oils and open drainwork and something floral underneath it all that might have been sweetroot or might have been something older and less classifiable. Vendors called out from low doorways. Children moved through the crowd at ankle height, doing work that children in this part of any city had always done.
An opportunistic pickpocket made a professional assessment of Sable's coat pockets and moved in from the left. Sable dislocated the man's wrist with a single small movement, not breaking stride, not looking down. They were given considerably more space after that.
The covered market gave way to an alley, and the alley narrowed into a lane that had likely not been officially mapped by the city's guild surveyors, bounded on both sides by walls that wept moisture and supported the kind of accumulated living infrastructure that grows in any place where people have no better options. Drainage channels ran directly along the muddied surface. People rested on woven reed mats in doorways and shallow alcoves, watching the three newcomers move through their lane with the calm, evaluating patience of people who had seen many things arrive and depart and had learned not to be surprised by any of them.
"Well?" Dante said. "Which one?"
Fenwick extended a finger toward a deep shadow beneath a rusted iron walkway that clung to the wall of a building whose original purpose had been architectural speculation for at least two generations. "Under there. She doesn't come out. Not for anything. Even her sweetgrape comes to her. You can see me now. That was everything."
Dante did not bother responding to this. He picked his way across the puddled lane toward the walkway, watching the shadows beneath it with the careful attention of someone who had learned that corners were where the interesting things happened.
Something moved in the darkness. Small, irregular, the restless shifting of a figure that was not quite settled.
"Sable. The perception lens."
Sable produced a palm-sized disc of treated crystal from his coat, its edges bound in copper wire etched with a low-grade clarity array, and placed it in Dante's extended hand. Dante fitted it over his left eye, letting the mana in the array attune to his own output, and the shadows resolved themselves into a green-tinged rendering of everything within range.
A figure sat on a woven reed mat against the wall. Small, abnormally so for an adult of any kind, wrapped in a shawl that had been grey and was now the color of the lane around it. Empty sweetgrape bottles occupied the mud in a rough circle, some of them half-submerged. One arm protruded from the shawl's edge, and the skin of that arm, under the clarity array's influence, registered as a different shade from everything else it illuminated. But then, the array tinted everything green, which was not especially useful as a distinguishing characteristic.
"Madam," Dante said. "I have a proposition."
The figure's head moved in a slow, imprecise arc. When it spoke, the voice was the sound of something rough being dragged across something rougher. "Sweetgrape," it rasped. "Bring sweetgrape, boy."
Dante felt the corner of his mouth move in something that was not quite a smile but occupied the same general region of his expression. The language faculty. The aversion to direct light. Two more boxes, quietly checked.
"The accent," Dante noted. "Interesting. Not from the central districts."
"Sweetgrape," the voice said again. "First the sweetgrape. Then the talk."
"Sable."
Sable reached into an inner coat pocket and withdrew a small ceramic bottle, sealed with wax, containing a Deepvein vintage that Dante had paid an unreasonable amount to acquire precisely for a moment like this. He took it and held it at the outer edge of the shadow, deliberately, at a distance that required the figure to reach for it.
He removed the perception lens.
The hand that shot from the shadows to take the bottle was quick, the sureness of something that had done this precise motion ten thousand times before, and it was not any color that the standard anatomy of any documented species had ever produced. It was the color of deep river stone, mottled in greens that shifted at the knuckles, and it was absolutely, unambiguously, exactly what he had been searching for across four territories and fourteen months of work.
Dante permitted himself nothing on the outside. He was very good at this. On the inside, something bright and inconvenient and thoroughly unwelcome rose up regardless, and he chose to acknowledge it for exactly one second before returning to the business at hand.
He turned back to Fenwick, who was already visibly calculating whether this was the moment to retreat. Sable produced a sealed payment envelope and handed it over with the precise, final quality of someone closing a transaction.
"You've done well, Mister Holst. You understand, naturally, that this conversation belongs to the three of us and no one else."
Fenwick took the envelope. "Completely. Absolutely. Not a word."
"I'm glad we agree. Because if a word did happen to find its way out, Sable is the sort of person who would track it back to the source, and then track that source until he found it again, wherever it had gone." Sable smiled pleasantly at Fenwick from across the lane, and Fenwick Holst moved away down the alley at a pace that stopped narrowly short of a run, counting his payment as he went because he needed something to do with his hands.
Dante turned back to the shadow under the iron walkway.
He settled into a crouch, bringing himself down to a level where the conversation could proceed between equals, or something in the general vicinity of equals, and looked into the darkness beneath the shawl where a pair of eyes caught the thin available light and returned it with a brightness that had no business existing in a face that otherwise appeared to have been living under a bridge for a considerable portion of a very long life.
"Now," he said. "You have something that I need. And before you tell me you don't know what I'm talking about, I should mention that I have spent fourteen months in pursuit of this specific conversation, across more false starts than I intend to recount, and I have prepared for it in rather comprehensive detail." He paused. "I know what you are. I know what you carry. I know why you've been here, in this lane, in this particular shadow, drinking sweetgrape from a runner's deliveries and waiting for the world to forget you exist."
The figure was very still now. The bright eyes watched him without blinking.
"I want your Codex," Dante said.
A silence that felt older than the lane, older than the city, older than most things Dante could name, settled between them.
"Codex," the figure said at last, the word arriving careful and cautious and shaped like something being tested for structural integrity. "Don't know any codex. I am a healer. You want book, there's a reading hall three streets over."
Dante exhaled through his nose with the measured patience of someone who had anticipated this exact response. "You are not a healer. You are a Veinborn, a deepwalker, a shimmer-kin. Whichever term you prefer to use, the biology is consistent." He held eye contact with the bright, ancient eyes in the shadows. "And I want your Codex."