Empress Borough smelled like tallow and old paper and the particular variety of human anxiety that accumulated in places where debts were held in writing.
The lending office occupied the ground floor of a building on Gareth Street, three blocks from the Empress Borough station, sandwiched between a pawnbroker and a boot mender whose sign had lost two letters to weather.
Fang Yuan arrived at ten in the morning, which was early enough that the clerk behind the counter had not yet developed the defensive posture that built up over the course of a day of managing people who owed money and did not have it.
“Edwin Colford,” he said.
“Account with a balance of twenty-two shillings.”
The clerk found the file.
He had the manner of someone accustomed to conversations that went one of two ways: payment or excuse.
He was already sorting Fang Yuan into the second category when Fang Yuan put thirty shillings on the counter.
The clerk reorganized.
He counted the coins with the care of someone who had been paid in debased currency before.
The coins were sound.
He marked the ledger, wrote a receipt, looked up.
“The additional eight shillings,” Fang Yuan said, “I would like applied to an extension of credit for the next calendar month.”
The clerk looked at him with the assessment of someone recalculating a risk profile.
“You’re current,” he said.
“You don’t need an extension.”
“I know,” Fang Yuan said.
“I would like one anyway.”
What he was buying was not credit.
He was buying the particular social position of a man who had resolved a debt and then demonstrated surplus.
The clerk would remember this.
The lending office would remember this.
In a district where reputation moved through the same channels as money, the thirty shillings did more work than clearing a balance.
He left with the receipt and the month’s flexibility and walked north toward Fenwick Lane through the back streets of Empress Borough, where the houses were narrower and the children in the doorways watched him with the specific attention of children who had learned early to read whether a passing adult was trouble or indifferent.
He was thinking about Pritchard.
He had been watching Pritchard for two weeks and had developed a model with gaps he had not yet located.
Twenty years old, possibly less.
Quick hands, habitual small errors, the particular quality of someone whose attention was elsewhere most of the time.
He copied contracts all day at Aldermast’s and spent a portion of each day watching Fang Yuan in a way he had never adjusted.
Most people, once their initial recalibration was complete, settled back into the texture of the office.
Pritchard had not settled.
He had two hypotheses.
One: Pritchard had known Edwin Colford well enough to notice the substitution and was deciding what to do about it.
Two: Pritchard had known Edwin Colford well enough to know what Edwin had been doing in August, and his current decision involved whether to approach or retreat.
Both hypotheses pointed toward the same conversation.
At the lunch interval that day he did not go to the pavement stall.
He sat at his desk and ate the bread he had brought and waited.
At quarter past twelve Pritchard came back in from outside and found Fang Yuan still there and stopped in the doorway for a moment with the look of someone revising a plan.
Fang Yuan said: “Sit down.”
Pritchard sat at his own desk, which was across the room, and then looked at Fang Yuan’s face and got up and came and sat in the chair nearest to him, the chair the front desk man used when reviewing work.
He sat in it with the awareness that he had chosen to move.
“You’re different,” Pritchard said.
His voice was low, the voice of someone reporting an observation they had been sitting on for two weeks.
“I know,” Fang Yuan said.
Pritchard absorbed this.
He was young enough that having his framing confirmed rather than deflected produced a visible recalibration, a slight opening.
He had been prepared to argue.
He was not prepared to proceed without argument.
“Edwin told me,” he said.
“About what he was working on.
Before August.”
“How much did he tell you?”
“Enough to know he shouldn’t have been doing it.” Pritchard looked at his hands.
“He said there was a formula.
He said he was going to try to obtain the first ingredient and see what happened.”
Fang Yuan kept his register where it was.
“What was the first ingredient?”
Pritchard looked up.
The look was evaluative in the specific way of someone deciding whether a disclosure would be met with competence or recklessness.
He had made a version of this assessment several times over the past two weeks and had not resolved it.
“There’s a dealer,” he said.
“In the Broad Street Market.
Rear stalls, eastern end.
He sells dried botanical goods, mostly legitimate.
In the back he keeps things that aren’t on the main counter.” He paused.
“Edwin told me the ingredient was something called Honora grass.
It’s a component of the Sequence 9 Seer potion.
Edwin had found the formula, but he hadn’t sourced the ingredient yet when things changed.”
Honora grass.
He stored the name and the location and the structure of what Pritchard was telling him, which was: Edwin had a formula but had not yet taken the first step when whatever happened to him in August happened.
Which meant whatever altered his cognition had not come from potion use.
It had come from the formula itself, or from something adjacent to the formula’s acquisition, or from something in that period he had not yet identified.
He revised his model of August again.
The model had more gaps than he had been accounting for.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said.
Pritchard looked at him for a moment.
“Because Edwin was the only person in this office worth talking to,” he said, “and now you’re here instead, and you know about the formula, and you know about what the oval symbol means, and either you’re going to do what Edwin was trying to do more carefully than Edwin did it, or you’re going to do something stupid and I’ll have to watch that happen.”
He paused.
“I’d rather help,” Pritchard said.
“If you’ll let me.”
Fang Yuan looked at him.
The offer had the quality of something a twenty-year-old said when they meant it and had not yet learned that sincerity was a poor substitute for utility.
The sincerity was real.
The utility was unknown.
“What can you do?” he said.
Pritchard was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: “I can read the oval markers.
My aunt taught me.
She was a Beyonder once, Sequence 7, before she stopped.” He said it the way someone said something they had never said to anyone before: with care, and with the awareness that saying it changed the status of the information.
“I can tell you which materials in an environment have been processed and which haven’t.
I can tell you whether a space is safe to work in.”
Fang Yuan assessed this.
The ability was narrow and specific and did not scale beyond its immediate use.
It was also, for someone three days away from attempting to obtain the first ingredient of a Beyonder potion in an unfamiliar system, not nothing.
“For now,” he said, “you can tell me whether the Broad Street dealer’s rear stall is a safe environment to conduct a transaction in.”
Pritchard nodded once, with the nod of someone who had offered something larger and was accepting the smaller assignment without complaint.
“I’ll go this afternoon,” he said.
“After work.”
Broad Street Market in the late afternoon had the smell of a market entering its final hours: fish that had been fresh that morning, vegetables losing their argument against time, the smoke from the braziers that the hot food sellers used to push one last hour of trade.
The rear stalls along the eastern end were quieter, the kind of quiet that existed in proximity to noise rather than in the absence of it.
Pritchard came to meet him at the market entrance at half past five, which was fifteen minutes earlier than agreed.
He had been there longer than that.
His boots were damp in a way that suggested standing on wet stone, not a short walk.
“It’s clean,” Pritchard said.
He meant the dealer’s stall.
He said it with the particular confidence of someone reporting on a sense that other people did not have, which was a confidence Fang Yuan had decided to treat as credible until it proved otherwise.
“The dealer himself?”
“No markers.
He’s not a Beyonder.
He sells to them.”
That was the more useful answer.
A non-Beyonder dealer operating in the gray market of supernatural components was a specific social type with specific motivations: he priced on information asymmetry and valued discretion over loyalty.
The transaction would be straightforward as long as Fang Yuan did not present himself as a buyer who could be complicated.
He went in.
The rear stall was separated from the main counter by a curtain of oilcloth.
The dealer was a man of sixty with the hands of someone who had spent a lifetime handling dried goods and the eyes of someone who had spent the same lifetime reading intentions.
He looked at Fang Yuan and looked at Pritchard behind him and made an assessment.
“Honora grass,” Fang Yuan said.
“Dried and sealed.”
The dealer reached under the counter without asking for proof of anything, which meant the ingredient was common enough in his trade that the question was price rather than permission.
He produced a small paper packet, twisted at the top, with a label in handwriting too small to read from across the counter.
“Eight shillings,” the dealer said.
The correct price for Honora grass in a gray market was not something Fang Yuan knew.
He had no reference point.
He had eight shillings remaining from the lending office transaction and the remains of Edwin’s original seven shillings and fourpence, minus the week’s food and one cab fare.
He could pay eight shillings and be left with funds insufficient for the remaining ingredients, or he could negotiate and risk the dealer deciding he was a difficult buyer.
He paid eight shillings.
He would need more money before the next step.
That was a separate problem with a separate solution and he would address it when this transaction was complete.
He left the market with the packet in his coat pocket, Pritchard half a step behind him, and walked two blocks before stopping at a corner to assess.
The packet was small.
It weighed almost nothing.
He was aware of it with an attention that was out of proportion to its physical presence, which he catalogued as the normal response of a person who had been pursuing an object for two weeks and had now obtained it.
He thought about whether that was what it was.
Pritchard said: “What do you do now?”
“Now I read more carefully,” Fang Yuan said.
He meant the formula.
He meant the gap in his model of August.
He meant the whole structure of this world’s metaphysical rules, which he had been assembling from fragments for eighteen days and which still had more holes than he could account for.
Pritchard nodded.
He had the look of someone who had expected a different answer and had decided this one was acceptable.
They parted at the corner.
Fang Yuan walked home with the grass in his coat, the city closing down around him for the evening, the gas lamps coming on in sequence down Fenwick Lane, each one appearing as the one behind it was still catching.
He had one ingredient.
He had a formula he did not yet understand.
He had two people who knew more about him than he had intended, and one of them had just become a provisional asset.
He went over the evening’s transaction and found it clean.
He found the Pritchard conversation clean.
He found his model of the current situation adequate for the next two weeks of operation.
He went inside.
He did not go over what Miss Aldham had said to him on the street corner, and the category he had reached for first when he looked at her, and the length of the correction.
He had filed those items and moved on.
He was aware, in the specific way one was aware of a sound that had stopped, that he had not returned to that file since.