Chapter 116: The Collector

Chapter 116: Chapter 116: The Collector

Donald spent most of the night at Joon’s bench with the dead man’s notebook open in front of him.

It was written in the Commonwealth script, which he couldn’t read, but Joon had drawn as much as he had written, and the drawings didn’t need translating. Page after page showed the ring from every side, the gold band and the flat black stone, with lines and arrows running out from it into a sketch of a man’s body. On one page Joon had drawn the man being struck by a sword, and then drawn a second arrow running backward from the man’s chest to the swordsman’s, as if the blow had been returned to the one who gave it.

Under that drawing, in different ink, Joon had written a single line in rough Westmark, as if he’d wanted to be sure that anyone could read it.

The ring does not protect him. It sends the bill.

Donald read the line several times before he closed the notebook and put it inside his jacket.

---

He left an hour before dawn.

Sylvia didn’t like it, and said so, but Donald needed to call Aris, and every call from a tablet could be traced to the place it was made from. If the call came from Joon’s house, the ward wouldn’t matter, because Paimon would know which street to watch. So he took the tablet down the hill on foot, using [Shade Step] only when he had to, until he reached a fish market by the river two kilometers away, where a hundred people were already shouting over crates of ice. Then he made the call from behind a stack of empty barrels.

Aris answered on the first ring, and she sounded as if she hadn’t slept.

"They started buying at the open this morning," she said, before he could say anything. "Eleven funds, all at once, all through brokers in the Free Cities. They’ve bought three hundredths of a percent of TIG in two hours. It isn’t much, but it’s fast, and it’s going to get faster."

"Taeyang’s shells," Donald said.

"I’d bet my office on it." He heard her typing. "Where are you? Your tracker went dark last night, and Evelyn has been standing on the Wall for six hours waiting for me to tell her you’re alive."

"I’m alive. Tell her that, and tell her I’m safe." He hesitated. "I need sixty-two million credits in four days, Aris. Don’t sell anything yet. Just start looking for every way we have to raise it, and send me the list."

There was a long silence on the line.

"Every way," Aris said at last. "All right. I’ll have it by tonight."

---

Kang Dae-han came through the gate of Joon’s house at sunrise, not long after Donald had gone.

Sylvia was on the porch when he arrived. She had seen him through the gaps in the gate before he touched it, a broad, quiet man in a black coat, perhaps fifty years old, with gray at his temples and big, square hands. He didn’t try to open the gate with a seal. He simply put one hand on it and pushed, and the wood bent inward and split down the middle, and the blue lines of the ward flickered across it and then went out along the line of the break.

He stepped into the courtyard and looked at her.

"The Chairman would like you to come to the tower," he said, in careful Westmark. "You won’t be hurt. You’ll only be kept until your Investor sells."

Sylvia read him the way the Lotus had taught her, by watching how he stood and where his weight sat, but she didn’t need to. He told her himself.

"I’ve been the Chairman’s guard captain for twelve years," he said. "I’m Level 70, and I’m a Collector. Every time I touch you, I take something from you, and I don’t give it back until you’ve paid. You’re fast, so I’ll take your speed first." He began to walk toward her across the courtyard, without hurrying. "Please come quietly. I don’t enjoy this part."

Sylvia drew her daggers.

"Neither will I," she said.

She moved before he reached the porch, straight off the edge of it and into the long shadow that the house threw across the courtyard in the early light. She came up out of the shadow of the broken gate behind him and drove both daggers at the back of his neck.

He turned faster than a man his size should have been able to, and the daggers scraped across the sleeve of his coat as his open hand closed on her wrist.

It was only a touch, and she twisted free at once, but she felt a tenth of her speed go out of her legs and into his hand.

She landed badly, a step slower than she meant to, and rolled away from his second grab and came up near the well in the center of the courtyard. On the back of her wrist, where his fingers had been, there was a small gray mark shaped like a stamp.

"One," Kang said, and kept walking toward her.

On his right hand, on the third finger, there was a thin gold ring with a black stone. It was smaller than the Chairman’s, but she could see the same dull glow in it.

Sylvia didn’t let him get close again. She ran along the courtyard wall and threw one dagger at his face, and when he raised his arm to block it, she pulled the dagger back into her shadow before it reached him. It came out of her storage again in her other hand as she cut at the back of his knee. He was already moving, and the blade only opened his coat.

His fingers brushed her shoulder as she slid past, and another tenth went with them.

"Two," Kang said.

He was faster now, and she was slower, and both of them knew it. Every time he touched her, the difference between them grew. If she tried to outrun him for much longer, he would catch her, and after that it would only be a matter of counting.

So she stopped trying to outrun him.

She stood still in the middle of the courtyard with both daggers lowered, breathing hard, and let him come.

Kang slowed, watching her, and for the first time he looked uncertain.

"You’re giving up," he said.

"No," Sylvia said. "I’m letting you get close."

He reached for her.

As his hand came forward, his own shadow came forward with it, thrown long across the stones by the low sun behind him, and Sylvia dropped straight down into it.

She didn’t travel anywhere. She stayed in his shadow, directly under his feet, where he couldn’t reach her without bending down to touch the stones, and she pulled everything out of her storage at once.

There were two iron training weights she always carried, a coil of steel cable, a broken dining chair from the hotel, Choi’s tag bundle with all six binding tags still in it, and both her spare daggers. All of it came up out of Kang’s shadow around his legs in a single rush, and the weights alone knocked him off balance before he understood what was happening.

The binding tags hit his shins and his hands and stuck there, all six of them, and she felt his mana stop moving.

The gray marks on Sylvia’s wrist and shoulder flickered. Without mana, Kang couldn’t hold what he’d taken, and she felt her speed come back into her legs all at once.

She came up out of his shadow behind him with one dagger already moving.

She didn’t go for his neck. Joon’s notebook had been open on the bench all night, and she had looked at the drawings too. She went for his right hand.

The tungsten edge went through the base of his third finger cleanly. The ring fell with it, struck the stones and bounced once, and its black stone cracked straight across with a sharp, ringing snap.

Kang screamed. It wasn’t a scream of pain. It was the sound of a man waking up from something very long and very bad.

He dropped to his knees in the courtyard, holding his hand against his chest, and when he looked up at her, his face had changed. The patience and the quiet were gone, and what was left looked frightened and old and very confused.

"Where—" He looked around the courtyard, at the broken gate and the house and the morning sky, as if he didn’t recognize any of it. "What year is it?"

Sylvia told him. He closed his eyes.

"Twelve years," he whispered. "He put it on me twelve years ago, in the tower, the night I was made captain. I’ve been inside it since then."

Sylvia kept her dagger ready, but she didn’t raise it. She knew what that look on his face meant, because she had seen it in her own mirror the morning after Donald had broken her contract with the Lotus.

"Then you can tell me where Seo-yeon is," she said.

Kang opened his eyes, and something passed over his face that was worse than confusion.

"In the tower," he said. "On the vault floor, below the dining room. When she came back last night, he was waiting for her." He swallowed. "He knows she sent the letter. He knows she brought you to this house. And tonight, at midnight, he’s going to make her swear a second oath on the Hanseong lock, one that binds her to him personally, and not to the Guild."

He looked straight at Sylvia.

"Your Investor’s skill breaks oaths to Guilds, doesn’t it? That’s what the Chairman believes. So he’s changing the oath to one your Investor can’t break."

Sylvia went very still.

Behind her, a shadow moved at the edge of the courtyard, and Donald stepped out of it with the tablet still in his hand. He had come back up the hill as fast as [Shade Step] could carry him, and he was out of breath and nearly out of mana.

He looked at the broken gate, at Kang kneeling on the stones, at the cracked ring lying by the well, and opened [Valuation Eye] on the man before he looked at Sylvia.

[Target: Kang Dae-han]

[Class: Collector (A-Rank). Level: 70.]

[Status: Ring severed. Oath to Taeyang Guild broken. Free.]

"Midnight," Sylvia said, before he could ask. "Tonight, in the tower."

[Quest Updated: The Crowned King’s Table.]

[Warning: Target Han Seo-yeon will be rebound by personal oath at midnight.]

[Time remaining: 17 hours.]