The inner ring announced itself not through noise, but the absence of it. The heckling died away. The drifting gaslight thinned and cooled, and the towers here stood far closer together, their brass gone dark with age rather than polished bright, as though the goods sold beneath them had never once needed advertising to find a buyer who already knew exactly what they wanted.
"Quieter," Julian said.
"Discretion sells better than volume, this deep in," Albert replied. "The people who shop in the inner ring generally already know what they're looking for. Loud men shouting after them tends to be counterproductive."
They passed a stall selling nothing but sealed lead boxes, each one humming faintly, each one priced beyond what Julian's own considerable salary could have covered in a decade. Another offered what the hand-lettered placard called, with no apparent irony, Provenance Available Upon Discretion — meaning, as Julian understood without it explained, that the provenance existed and would not survive being spoken aloud in front of witnesses.
It was Renfrew who stopped first, some hundred paces further in, at the edge of a crowd gathered loosely around a raised wooden platform lit by a ring of the same cold blue-white candles that had burned without wax throughout the market. An auctioneer's voice carried over the crowd, reading out a lot number and starting bid, and it took Julian a full three seconds — three seconds he would later resent himself for — to understand what was being sold.
The cages were small. That was the detail he noticed first. Small and shrouded, and quiet in a way that had nothing to do with calm and everything to do with fear.
"Don't," Iain said low, before Renfrew's hand had finished moving toward whatever instinct had put it there. His voice had gone flat, the way Julian recognized immediately, it was the voice of one holding something enormous behind a closed door because opening it here would accomplish nothing except getting everyone in this corridor killed. "Not here. Not like this."
"They're children—"
"I know what they are." Something in Iain's face was not calm at all, and Julian understood exactly how much control the man was spending to keep his voice at the volume it was currently pitched to. "Western kingdoms, most likely, sold south of a border that doesn't ask questions. And if the four of us start something in the middle of the inner ring, Inspector, we do not walk out of here, and neither do they. The Tollkeepers keep the peace. They do not care whose peace it is." He drew a slow breath. "This gets reported. Tonight. Through channels that can actually act upon it without getting a Warden or an Order Member killed in a black market neither of us has jurisdiction in. That is the only version of helping that exists in this corridor. I am sorry it isn't a better one."
Julian said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't have been a lie in one direction and a liability in the other. However, he made sure to remember the location and auctioneer's face. He would make certain, once they were above ground and the King's business was concluded, that this particular auction found its way into a report that several extremely capable people would take seriously.
Albert did not speak at all, which Julian noticed because it was so unlike him. His jaw had gone tight beneath the mustache, and his hand — normally so composed — had curled once, briefly, behind his back, before he took back control and let it fall still again.
"This way," was all he said and led them off the edge of the crowd with more speed than strictly necessary.
Nobody spoke again until the auctioneer's voice had faded fully behind them, swallowed by the distance and the market's own indifferent noise.
The stall that stopped them next could not have been a starker contrast, which Julian suspected was entirely deliberate — the inner ring's particular cruelty was that horror and joy sat side by side with no transitional period offered between them. The market held no opinions on its merchandise.
A narrow table, dimly lit, presented under glass a scattering of old paper: fragments of maps, a broken compass rose, and a single yellowed page covered edge to edge in cramped, hurried handwriting.
"A genuine article, my good lord, genuine, I assure you," the vendor said, a thin man with ink-stained fingers who clearly clocked the quality of Julian's coat from thirty paces and adjusted his speech accordingly.
Julian glanced at it for perhaps two seconds. The hand didn't match anything he'd seen reproduced from Beyond the Ash — rougher, more slanted, half the page crossed out and rewritten in margins, nothing like the careful, publishable prose preserved in the Erengardt archives. Whether that made it more authentic or simply better forged, he had neither the time nor the professional interest to determine.
"Not today," he said, and kept walking.
"Your loss, my lord! Dragons don't write themselves into two sperate accounts by accident—"
Albert fell back into step beside him, allowing himself the smallest exhale that might, in a man with less self-control, have been a laugh. "You'll want to be more careful, my lord. From what I've gathered on her, that's precisely the kind of thing that ends up interesting Miss Ashcroft, given half a reason."
"Then it's fortunate Miss Ashcroft isn't here."
"Fortunate for your afternoon schedule. Considerably less fortunate for the vendor, I imagine, given what she'd likely offer him for the rest of the collection."
They found the broker's shop another two turns past that, exactly where the small, folded card in Albert's coat promised it would be — unremarkable from the outside, a narrow storefront wedged between two darker, quieter shops, its window shuttered, its door marked with nothing but a small brass plate too tarnished to read from more than a few feet away. Iain and Renfrew had fallen half a step behind, the four of them arriving together at the threshold none of them, for entirely different reasons, were particularly eager to cross.
Well," Albert said, straightening his cuffs one final time, monocle catching the last drifting light before the shuttered doorway swallowed it whole. "Shall we, my lord?"
He knocked before Julian could answer, three precise taps, and somewhere beyond the door, something that had been very still went, deliberately, very chaotically loud.
The door opened on its own, swinging inward on a hinge that made no sound at all, and revealed a shop much too large for the storefront that housed it. The outside had promised a single cramped room. The inside offered a hall — shelves rising in tiers far past where the ceiling should have allowed them, ladders on brass rails vanishing up into the gloom, the whole space lit by candle-flames burning every color except the one's candles were supposed to burn. Julian did not comment on it. He had stopped commenting on most of the Undertoll's architecture.
"GUESTS!" The word arrived before the man who spoke it did, booming out from somewhere among the shelves with theatrical delight. "Guests, guests, and not the sort to skulk — I hear boots that mean to pay, and boots, my friends, are so rarely honest about their intentions!"
He emerged from between two showering shelves with the flourish of a man who had rehearsed every one of his entrances for decades and never once grew tired of them — extraordinarily tall, built like a coat rack with opinions, draped in a long patchwork coat of mismatched velvets that had clearly been assembled rather than professionally tailored, a stovepipe hat tipped at an angle no sober man would attempt, and gloved hands that moved constantly, sketching shapes in the air as though punctuations alone couldn't be trusted to do the work.
"Master Evander Quill, at your considerable service," he said, sweeping into a bow that somehow managed to look both mocking and entirely sincere. "Though the market, in its infinite lack of imagination, prefers simply the Cataloguer. I collect what history forgets to keep, my friends, and history forgets oh so very much."
The shelves around them certainly lived up to his title. Jars of things Julian chose not to examine too closely. A row of skulls arranged by size rather than species, several of them belonging to nothing Julian recognized from any species table the Association had ever published. Maps titled Europe and Asia, no places within the known world of Aethel, drawn in ink that moved, slowly, when unwatched. A single dented teakettle, given pride of place on its own velvet cushion, for reasons Julian suspected he did not want explained.
"You have something for me," Julian said, declining to match the theater act.
"I have everything for everyone, my lord, that is rather the point of me." Quill's eyes — an unsettling shade of green that didn't quite match the candlelight — sharpened, all the whimsy folding briefly into something considerably more calculating before the performance resumed. "But you've come for a dead man's handwriting, haven't you. Gestalt. Nine banners, one betrayal, a friend who did not survive." He tapped one gloved finger against his own temple. "Ink outlives intention, sir. That is the whole of my trade, in eleven words or fewer."
"Do you have it or not." Julian had opted to bypass the questions he had pertaining to how the broker knew exactly what he wanted.
"Oh, I have it." Quill produced, from some pocket that was not there a moment ago, a single folded page, edges brittle, ink faded to the color of old rust. "The question, my lord, was never whether. The question is what a page like this is worth to a man who already carries a King's coin and doesn't need my permission to spend it." He held the page just out of reach, tilting his head. "Coin bores me ever so. Coin is the least interesting thing anyone has ever offered me, and I have been offered a great many uninteresting things across a great many years."
Again, with the knowledge he should not possess. "Then name your price," Julian said, mulling over his current assets.
"A favor." Quill said it lightly. "Unspecified. Uncollected, for now. Owed to the Cataloguer, redeemable at a time and in a manner of my own choosing, so long as it does not ask you to break faith with your own King. I am eccentric, sir, not treasonous." His smile widened, sharp at its edges. "You strike me as a man who keeps his debts. I find that considerably more valuable than gold, which anyone can print more of."
Julian considered this for exactly as long as the weight of it deserved. An open debt to a strange man who dealt in secrets was not nothing — it was, in fact, precisely the kind of leverage he would have advised anyone else against taking. But the page was real, he was nearly certain of it now, close enough to see the hand shaking faintly toward the bottom of the page in a way no forger troubled themselves to fake, and Aldous had been plain about what this was worth.
"Done," Julian said. "Within reason."
"Within reason," Quill repeated, delighted, as though Julian had told a very pleasant joke. "Indeed. Very well, Second Seat. I accept your reasonable debt." He surrendered the page with a flourish, and it passed into Julian's hand feeling considerably heavier than a single sheet of old paper had any right to feel.
Iain stepped forward before the moment could close completely. "I have business of my own, if the Cataloguer had room for a second transaction."
"The Cataloguer always has room. Rooms are, after all, rather my specialty." Quill's attention swung to him with undiminished joy, though something behind his eyes flickered the moment he saw the ash-grey coat. "A Warden. How the Undertoll does collect its titles today."
"Three pages, Tier III Grimoire, sealed. Stolen from Bureau custody eight months ago. I understand it passed through your hands."
"Many things pass through my hands, Warden. It is, again, rather the point of me." Quill spread his gloved hands out, an actor savoring a pause. "But yes, friend. I do recall your pages. Rude little things, ink still cross with whoever wrote them."
"Who bought them."
"Ah! Now that—" Quill pressed a hand to his own chest as though the very question had wounded him, "—is a considerably more interesting price than a favor. Names are heavy things to carry, Warden. I don't give them away for free, and I don't, as a professional courtesy, always have them to give." He circled Iain, slow and theatrical, one finger trailing along a shelf of jars. "What I have for free is this: a man in a mask that hid nothing so much as it announced there was something worth hiding. Paid in full, no haggling — which tells you more than his face could have — and left a single sentence behind on his way out the door, the way certain men leave a coin on a bar they never intend to visit again."
He paused, savoring the wait. "'Tell your buyers the Pale does not forget a kindness.' Make of that whatever a Warden such as yourself makes of things."
Iain's expression did not change, though, something settled behind it — a piece finding the edge of a puzzle he'd clearly been assembling for some time without a full picture. "That's all he said?"
"That is all he said that I intend to sell you today." Quill's smile turned, briefly, almost kind. "Come back when you have something more interesting to trade than a badge that isn't even in your sidekick's pocket anymore, Warden." He gestured to Renfrew before broadening his smile, "and then, we'll discuss the rest."
"I intend to." Iain inclined his head, the closest thing to a genuine thank you that broker was ever going to get out of him. "We'll be back, Cataloguer."
"Oh, I do hope so." Quill's eyes moved once across all four of them, lingering — Julian noted with a push of his glasses — a half-second too long on Albert, and Albert alone. "I have a very good feeling, my friends, that this will not be the last time the four of you darken my very impossible doorway. Do come back. I so rarely tire of company that pays its debts."
They left the shop to the sound of him humming something under his breath, tuneless and pleased, as the door swung shut behind them.
"He knows something," Julian said, once they'd put three stalls of distance between themselves and the shuttered storefront.
"Everyone in this market knows something others don't," Albert replied. "The trick, my lord, is that he knows it, and enjoys watching people wonder which parts. I'd wager we'll see him again before either of us cares to."
Iain, walking a half-step behind, said nothing as he tried to piece together every detail he had so far. The puzzle wasn't complete; it still missed many pieces.
It was Renfrew, finally, who broke the silence, glancing sideways at a narrow, warmly lit storefront they were passing — steam curling from somewhere behind a beaded curtain, the smell of broth and scorched garlic entirely out of place amid the ozone and old paper of the inner ring. "Is that—"
"Feng's," Albert said, already approaching it. "Best bowl in the Undertoll, possibly all of Aethel, and I say that having tried considerably more of them than is probably good for me. We've time before the crossing. My lord, you look like a man who has not eaten today, which I will not pretend surprises me."
The shop inside was small, warm, and entirely different from everything else in the inner ring — a handful of mismatched stools before a long wooden counter, steam rising from great iron pots, bundles of dried herbs hanging from a low ceiling that, mercifully, staying exactly where a ceiling belonged. Behind the counter, working a mound of dough with practiced hands, stood a skeleton in a stained apron, singing tunelessly to himself in a language Julian didn't recognize but suspected, from the cadence, hailed from somewhere considerably east of the Greymount Spine.
"Two, my lord?" Albert asked, already holding up fingers before Julian could object to a lunch break while on mission. "Feng, if you please — and one for the Warden and his Inspector, on the Palace's account, should they care to join us before their business calls them elsewhere."
The skeleton — Feng, evidently — turned, empty sockets somehow conveying emotions of warmth that Julian would never have believed a fleshless face capable of and inclined his skull in something between a nod and a bow. He did not speak. Julian understood, without it needing to be explained, that he generally didn't.
"He was Canzhou-born," Albert said quietly, while Feng set to work, ladling broth with the competence of a man who had done it ten thousand times and would happily do it ten thousand more. "A very long time ago, and by means I have never asked him to relive for my benefit. Someone brought him back with an art the Hollow Vigil would have very strong feelings about, and whatever else someone intended for him, Feng decided, on his own, that what he wanted to do with the rest of his afterlife — was cook. I find that rather admirable, my lord. Most people given a second existence spend it on revenge. He spent it on broth.
Canzhou. Julian had read about it in Beyond the Ash. Matthis Vayle's personal, unconfirmed account of the place to the east of the Greymount Spine Mountain Range. Not much is known for the pure fact that it is so far away that nobody in the west had bothered to know it.
"Best bowl in the Undertoll," Julian said, finally echoing Albert without ever meaning to. Something in Feng's posture suggested, wordlessly, that this was exactly the correct response.
They ate — and for the first time that day, Renfrew seemed to relax, visibly; Iain quieter than usual, still turning the masked man's sentence over; Albert holding forth on the relative merits of three separate broth recipes with the seriousness other men reserved for treaties — until the bowls were empty and the warmth of the little shop had done more to steady the evening than Julian would have admitted aloud to anyone but Cordelia.
"This is where we part, I think," Iain said, eventually, setting coin on the counter that Feng waved away with a small, firm shake of his skull, prompting Iain to leave it anyway. "Renfrew and I have a masked man to start asking after, and I doubt your business involves tracking him."
"It does not." Julian confirmed.
Then good hunting, my lord." Iain extended a hand, and Julian took it. "I'd say it's been a pleasure, but I find that word does very little work in a place like this one."
"It has been an efficient encounter." Julian offered instead, which seemed to suit them both considerably better.
"Butler." Iain nodded to Albert. Renfrew, considerably more composed than she'd been an hour prior, managed something that was almost a smile.
"Do try not to get eaten by anything on your way back to the crossing point," she said, and Julian decided he liked her rather more for it.
"We'll do our best," Albert said, already rising, already straightening his cuffs for what Julian suspected was the dozenth time today. "Come along, my lord. The ritual site won't hold itself open forever, and I, for one, have a palace to return to before someone starts asking pointed questions about my whereabouts."
They left Iain and Renfrew at the counter, the warm light of Feng's shop shrinking behind them as the inner ring's stranger, colder glow closed back in, a single page of a dead man's handwriting folded carefully inside Julian's coat, and a debt he did not yet know the shape of settling somewhere in his lungs like a held breath.