The bells of Weyer rang seven times with long, low tones that vibrated through stone and flesh alike. The fog on the river did not stir.
Adrian stood at the edge of the west tower's balcony, coat unbuttoned despite the cold, one hand gripping the rusted iron rail, the other stuffed in his pocket around a half-finished note. Ink had bled through it in the damp, and he didn't mind. The view was better than anything he could write.
Below, the city spread out like a beautiful nightmare: chimneys among copper domes and crumbling slate roofs, a sprawl of buildings piled in messy layers, pressing outward until they broke into the coastline, against the river or the sea.
Smoke exhaled into the already gray morning. Seagulls circled above the merchant docks. Somewhere in the Old Quarter, a street vendor was already shouting about fruit that hadn't seen sunlight in two weeks and that no one with the slightest bit of common sense would have eaten if it had been free, much less bought now that the prices had risen again.
And in the midst of all of this, from the east — slow, almost unnervingly so — came the black carriage.
"There." said Erika, pointing with the grace that her private preceptor had forced her to apply to all facets of social life since she had been four "That must be him, right?"
"Hard to say." said Rupert, squinting as he leaned over the rail beside Adrian. "Could be a tax collector."
Adrian said nothing. He watched the carriage crawl up the hill, its wheels screeching against the wet stones. A family emblem he didn't recognize — ink-black crane on light gray cloth — flapped at its side. The horses were white and mute.
"He's not slouched enough to be a tax collector," the fourth student replied, after the carriage had stopped in the courtyard and the lone passenger had set foot outside. Adrian turned towards the speaker. Helge was sitting on the high wall behind them, his legs folded like a sailor from the southern seas at rest, though his gaze was sharp. None of them had noticed his arrival. "Posture's military. Might've been an officer once."
This was the man.
Professor Lao Zhe.
Whispers had preceded him by weeks. Rumors said in half jest from students who claimed to have seen him once at a occultists' meeting in Wenten, or in a footnote of a banned archaeological journal. Some said he'd been exiled from his homeland, which was probably the only true thing among that sea of lies. Others swore he carried his father's ashes in a lacquer box and consulted them before every lecture.
None of these grotesque rumors mattered. What actually mattered was this: the university had not hosted a scholar from the Nieteri Empire in the last fifty years, and never one rumored to know the old arts.
"It's weird, isn't it?" Helge asked no one in particular. "If he really is an occultist of some kind than I cannot fathom why the Empire didn't just bury him alive or burn him at the stake, but if he isn't then there must be some other reason for all the rumors that have been going around lately, and I cannot figure out what that would be at all."
"Are they really that harsh on students of the arcane over there?" Rupert asked him. He was also a foreigner but his homeland, the Free Barony of Steyr, was merely a few weeks of travel from Eisenerz. The Nieteri Empire on the other hand was literally on the other side of the known world.
Helge nodded, a serious look in his eyes. "Their new Emperor has a certain distaste for witchcraft, it seems. When I travelled there with my father — we were trading spices at the time — I saw an old man get beaten to death by city guards in broad daylight. He had pulled a simple parlor trick, changed the color of the light from a lantern or something like that."
Erika scoffed at them. "Do not pretend we are any better. Instead of killing him in the middle of a street we would have done it behind locked doors, that is all."
Adrian's thoughts prickled. He had spent the last three years cataloging the library's banned collection, copying fragments, bribing teachers' assistants, painstakingly consulting faded footnotes, decoding ciphers, all for hints, for scraps, for fragments of knowledge which wouldn't complete what he already knew even if they revealed themselves to be true. And now someone had arrived who might have the whole picture.
Rupert whistled as he eyed a scroll case hanging by Lao Zhe's belt. "They say he speaks twelve languages."
"Four of them dead, in the version I heard." Helge added.
Erika scoffed again. "The man probably invented half of them. Scholars always do. It's a trick to keep the rest of us feeling inferior."
"You know, Erika, I'm starting to think that no one will ever need to do that if you're around. You already manage the whole inferiority complex thing just fine on your own." Rupert said, grinning.
Adrian tuned them out. His focus stayed fixed on the figure that had stepped from the carriage as it now halted at the university gates.
Lao Zhe was shorter than expected. His stride was slow, but firm and steady. Looking at him walk, Adrian thought that maybe Helge was right. The scholar could definetely have been a soldier at some point. He wore a coat that seemed too light for the weather — black silk embroidered with a naturalistic pattern — and his hair was tied back in a tight knot. He paused at the threshold of the gate, as if listening to something. Then he walked in.
"Should we go meet him?" Rupert asked, only half joking.
"No." Adrian murmured, but not out of shyness.
Because suddenly — just briefly — the air had grown colder. The chill was not like the sudden gusts of wind which were so common in winter. More like subtraction of a sort. Like something had been taken from the space around them: a degree of warmth, a measure of weight, a counterpoint so fundamental you'd never notice it until it was gone.
It passed.
None of the others said anything, Erika and Rupert just pulled their coats tighter, but the ever perceptive Helge sat up straighter.
"He always notices stuff like this." Mused Adrian, before addressing everybody. "Regardless of what I personally feel like, trying to get on his good side is probably the correct decision. Does anyone disagree?" Nobody moved to oppose this motion. "Very well then, it's three votes to one."
"Well," Erika said after a moment. "Let's see what this mystery professor teaches. I hope it won't be too disappointing."
They lingered a moment longer, watching Lao Zhe disappear into the inner courtyard of the university, swallowed by its ancient stone arches and columns cracked with ivy. The fog had begun to lift. Adrian folded the damp note in his hand and looked down at the city again. Weyer, in all its misery and ambition, still thrived below them. Even from here he could see the scaffolds rising around the Parliament's new steel and glass tower, the factories stretching fingers of smoke into the pale sky, the canal steam ferries crawling like bugs across the dull river.
The city was rotting. Beautiful, but rotting. It was the kind of place where power and decay live hand in hand, and because history is a matter of action and reaction Adrian knew that someone, one day, was going to change that place for the better.
He intended to be that someone.