Chapter 532: Auctioneers
A new mask and a new suit.
’A new goal too,’ Dasha thought to himself.
The rooftop was crooked, a slab of rusted steel and scavenged brick overlooking a network of tight, crisscrossing alleyways below. Pipes groaned in the walls. Smoke hissed from somewhere far off. The Underground didn’t allow for beauty. Just function, ugly, necessary function. It didn’t matter the neighbourhood.
Ahead of him loomed the structure known as the Auctioneers’ Guildhall, headquarters of the most infamous thief guild in this subsection. He caught whispers. He asked his child spy network. He wasn’t able to glean as much as he liked.
It was massive. Not tall, but broad, sprawling like a crouching beast. It was built low, using overlapping walls of scrap metal and fortified blackstone. Not a single window in sight. Just high walls, reinforced gates, and slit-like vents that looked more like scars than openings. A dozen chimneys fumed silently, puffing out slow, poisonous curls of something not quite smoke.
Dasha stood on a rooftop facing this building. His cloak barely stirred in the windless air.
Kneeling beside him was a former attacker. No older than twenty and with prematurely gray hair cropped close to the scalp, and a cursed eye that flickered weakly with mana. In their scuffle, Dasha did not gaze into his eye and so the curse’s ability did not activate. Dasha did not plan to peer into it either. A brand burned around his neck marked him as his property. The imprint on his flesh was just one layer. The second came in the form of a thin chain, inscribed with more binding runes. He could not lie. He could not disobey.
And he knew it.
Dasha closed his eyes and extended his Qi Sense, hoping to map the structure: walls, patrols, heat, and heart beats.
Nothing.
Nothing.
His mind hit a wall of silence. like diving into still, black water.