Chapter 112: Hanseong

Chapter 112: Chapter 112: Hanseong

The long-range airship TIG had chartered left Genesis City at dawn and flew east for a day and a half, first over the gray water of the Narrow Sea and then over the mountains of the mainland, where snow still lay on the highest peaks.

Sylvia slept for most of the first day. She had told Donald, before she lay down on the bench at the back of the cabin, that she hadn’t slept properly in a moving vehicle since she was a child, because the Lotus had taught her that the people who sleep on the way to a job don’t wake up at the end of it. Then she slept for nine hours straight and didn’t stir once.

Donald spent the time with his status window open.

He hadn’t touched his free points since before Aldmere, and now that he had [Shade Step], he knew exactly where they needed to go. Each jump cost forty mana, and in a city he had never seen, surrounded by people who might want him dead, the number of times he could disappear mattered more than how hard he could hit.

[Free Points: 23.]

[Allocate: Mana +15, Speed +8.]

[Confirm?]

"Confirm," he said quietly.

[Name: Donald]

[Class: Investor (SSS+)]

[Level: 27]

[Strength: 104]

[Speed: 108 → 116]

[Stamina: 102]

[Mana: 108 → 123]

[Free Points: 0]

It wasn’t a large change, but it meant three jumps in a row instead of two, and he closed the window feeling better than he had since the Glass Field.

When Sylvia woke, it was dark outside the windows. She sat up, looked at the clock above the cockpit door, and frowned at it as if it had lied to her.

"You let me sleep for nine hours," she said.

"You needed it."

"I needed four, and the rest was you being soft." She came forward and sat across from him, pulling her knees up onto the seat. "Tell me the plan again, and this time tell me the parts you skipped last night."

So he told her. Park Jae-won had invited him to talk, and Donald meant to let him, because a man who sets a price before a meeting usually wants to sell something. What Park wanted to sell was the lien, and Donald needed to know what he’d ask for it. If the price was something TIG could pay, he would pay it, and if it wasn’t, he would walk away and find another way before Day 7.

"And if he doesn’t let you walk away?" Sylvia asked.

"Then we leave through your shadow."

She was quiet for a moment, studying him. "You’ve thought about that part more than the rest."

"I’ve thought about all of it," Donald said. "That’s just the part I like least."

---

Hanseong came out of the morning haze a little after seven.

From the air, the city looked as if two cities had been built on top of each other. The older one was low and gray, a grid of tiled roofs, stone walls and narrow streets running down to a wide brown river, with the long walls of a palace sitting in the middle of it. The newer one rose out of the old one in towers of black glass and steel, taller and closer together than anything in Genesis City, so that the streets between them stayed in shadow even after the sun had come up.

The tallest of the towers stood on the north bank of the river. A black sun twenty meters wide was set into the glass near its top.

"That’s Taeyang," Sylvia said, beside him at the window.

"Thirty-one years without a breach," Donald said. Aris had sent him the reports the night before. "Every other nation with an anchor has lost at least one district since the Breaking. The Eastern Commonwealth hasn’t lost a single street."

"Because Paimon is the one holding the door shut."

"Because a good landlord doesn’t burn down his own building," Donald said.

The airship came down on a landing platform on the roof of a tower beside the river, and when the ramp lowered, the morning air came in warm and damp and smelling of the water.

A woman was waiting for them at the bottom of the ramp.

Two guards in black coats stood behind her, but she stood apart from them, with her hands folded in front of her and her back very straight. She was perhaps forty, tall for a woman of the Commonwealth, and she wore a fitted dark gray suit that had clearly been made for her alone. The jacket was cut close at her narrow waist, and the skirt below it was pulled tight over wide, full hips before it ended just above her knees. Her body was soft and generous where the suit held it, with heavy breasts that pressed against the buttons of her jacket and long legs in dark stockings. She had a pale, smooth face, high cheekbones and a full mouth, and her black hair was pinned up at the back of her head, leaving her long neck bare.

Her eyes were dark, calm, and very tired.

The System window opened before Donald had taken his second step down the ramp.

[Investment Target Detected.]

[Name: Han Seo-yeon]

[Age: 41]

[Class: Sealkeeper (A-Rank)]

[Level: 73]

[Status: Bound. Holds the Hanseong anchor lock under an oath sworn to Taeyang Guild.]

[Note: Oath is enforced by the master of a ring-bound host.]

[Potential: S-Rank.]

[Investment Recommended.]

Donald closed it and kept walking, without letting anything show on his face.

"Welcome to Hanseong, Investor," the woman said, and bowed from the waist. Her Westmark was precise, with only a trace of an accent. "My name is Han Seo-yeon. I’m the Chairman’s daughter-in-law, and I run the Taeyang Guild’s affairs on his behalf. He would have met you himself, but he doesn’t leave the tower anymore, so I’ve come in his place."

"Thank you for meeting us," Donald said. "This is Sylvia, my companion."

Seo-yeon’s eyes moved to Sylvia and rested there for a second, taking in the daggers at her belt and the way she stood just behind Donald’s left shoulder. Then she bowed again.

"The Chairman will see you tonight, at dinner, in the tower," she said. "Until then, rooms have been prepared for you across the river. A car is waiting downstairs."

---

The car was black and silent, and the city moved past the windows in long lines of glass and stone. Seo-yeon sat across from them with her hands in her lap and pointed out a few things as they passed, the old palace, the river bridges, the market streets under the towers, in the same calm voice, so that it sounded like something she had done many times for many guests.

Donald watched her while she talked. Once, when the car passed under the Taeyang tower, she stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence and didn’t start again until the tower was behind them.

At the hotel, she walked them to the door of their suite on the thirtieth floor and handed Donald the key.

"If you need anything before tonight, call the front desk and ask for me," she said. "I’ll come myself."

"You’re very kind," Donald said.

"I’m very careful," Seo-yeon said. For a moment she looked straight at him, and he thought she was going to say something else. Instead she bowed one more time, turned, and walked back down the corridor to the lift with her two guards behind her.

Sylvia shut the door and went straight to work. She checked the lamps, the vents, the telephone and the frames of the paintings, and she sent her shadow under the bed and behind the wardrobe, until at last she came back to the middle of the room holding two small black disks between her fingers.

"Listening stones," she said. "One in the light above the bed, one behind the mirror." She dropped them both into her shadow, where they vanished. "They’ll hear nothing but the inside of my storage now."

"Leave the rest of the room as it is," Donald said. "If we find too many, they’ll know we’re looking."

He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair, and something white slid out of the inner pocket and fell to the floor.

It was a small square of paper, folded twice. He hadn’t put it there.

Donald picked it up and unfolded it. The handwriting was small and neat, in black ink.

The man you are having dinner with tonight is not the man who wrote your letter. Please help me.

H.

[Quest: The Crowned King’s Table. Days remaining: 5.]