He found them in the central plaza by reading the specific quality of their mana signatures — not the signatures themselves, the specific tension that accumulated in a practitioner's field when they had been presented with something annoying and were deciding how to address it.
Young Master Tan had the physique and the equipment of someone whose father's position had funded both without requiring the personal development that would have justified either. The twelve-man guard escort was the kind of resource that said more about the father's operational budget than the son's threat level. The opening line he had apparently chosen for Rosanne was the kind that someone who had never encountered a practitioner from outside their own context would choose.
Rosanne's hands were on her dagger hilts. Not drawn — she hadn't decided to draw them yet, which meant she was still processing whether the situation merited the energy.
He walked into the space beside her rather than in front of her.
Tan registered him. The social calculus of a mayor's son in a frontier settlement ran quickly: new factor, unknown affiliation, dark coat, no visible markers of local faction.
"This is a private conversation," Tan said. "Who are you?"
"We're registered with the Brimstone Conclave," Markus said. "The Eternity party. We cleared the Gold boards yesterday and filed three Platinum contracts this morning." He looked at Tan with the specific quality of attention he used for relevant information. "If you check the registry, you'll find our contract history. The Conclave's Senior Registrar handled the filing personally."
A beat.
Tan looked at his guard captain. The guard captain's expression had already done the calculation — the Platinum board access, the Gold clearance that had required frontier anomalies rather than standard Tier progression — and had arrived at a different read of the situation than the one the conversation had begun with.
"The Conclave recognises your party," the guard captain said, quietly, to Tan.
Tan's posture had the specific quality of someone who had started a conversation from a position he had thought was strong and had discovered mid-sentence that the position was weaker than he'd understood. He made the decision that people with enough social awareness to exist in frontier territory eventually made: he recalibrated rather than escalating.
"A misunderstanding," he said, with the smoothness of someone who had practice at this particular exit. "Frontier hospitality. No offence intended."
"None taken," Rosanne said, which was diplomatically accurate rather than warm.
The escort moved through. The plaza resumed its evening rhythm.
Rosanne looked at Markus with the expression she used when something had been resolved and she was filing the relevant data. "The guild ranking carries social weight here."
"Yes," he said. "The Platinum filing this morning was more useful than I thought it would be at the time."
"Is that why you filed three contracts simultaneously."
"I filed them because we can complete them," he said. "The social effect is a secondary benefit."
She looked at him with the expression she used when she was deciding whether to call out the fact that the secondary benefit had been obvious at the time of filing.
She decided not to.
"The feast," she said.
"At the inn," he said.
They went.
The suite smelled like Campeón from the corridor.
The specific combination of oak smoke and honey glaze from the boar preparation, the garlic-rubbed crust on the prime loin, the salt-crust chicken's fat rendering — the full scope of it arrived at range, and the contrast with a week of mineral-heavy primordial game meat was significant.
Rosanne said nothing. She simply moved toward the table.
The meal had the quality of a genuinely welcome thing. Not performed enjoyment — the real thing, the specific pleasure of food that was familiar after a week of food that wasn't, prepared at the quality that Campeón maintained and that the spatial stasis had preserved intact.
They ate properly rather than decorously, which was appropriate after a week of primordial frontier food that required using your hands regardless of cutlery provision. The honey glaze on the boar ribs had developed correctly in the stasis — the reduction's caramelisation preserved exactly as it had been when it left the kitchen, the herbs in the bone reduction still bright rather than flattened.
He ate his own portion without monitoring anyone else's.
The conversation that ran alongside the meal was the operational kind: what Rosanne and the team had gathered at the Whispering Slag Tavern, the tribute pattern they had identified, the faction that was paying short consistently. He added what the Platinum contracts covered and the geographic relationship between the three anomaly sites.
Donna had been running a mental map of the survey territory and produced the observation that the three Platinum anomalies clustered in the same geographic sector as the northern edge of the area the innkeeper's map had flagged as Vorash's territory.
"Not coincidence," Rosanne said.
"Probably not," he agreed. "We complete the contracts because the contracts are legitimate problems that the settlement needs addressed. The intelligence we gather running them is supplementary."
"What are we looking for," Jessica said.
"The boundary where Vorash's territorial management starts to affect the regional ecosystem directly. The Platinum threats are higher-tier than the Gold work — that tier differential is usually driven by something. I want to know what's generating them and whether the pattern is consistent with the gate harvesting architecture we've been documenting."
"You think the Tier 5 anomalies are downstream effects of the harvesting operation," Mika said.
"I think it's possible," he said. "I want the field data before I commit to the hypothesis."
The boar ribs were finished. The prime loin was significantly diminished. The crackling chicken had been reduced to the kind of clean bone that indicated it had been properly appreciated.
"Sleep first," he said. "The anomalies in the morning, when our reserves are full."
"Obviously," Rosanne said, which was her version of agreement that had a mild complaint embedded in it about the necessity of stating the obvious.
He let it stand.
Nagini coiled to the warm stone of the windowsill and settled there, reading the settlement's nighttime through the spatial domain with the unhurried attention she brought to new environments that she had decided were worth understanding.
He reviewed the contract geography for twenty minutes, noted the relationships between the three sites, and went to sleep.
In the morning: Platinum tier.
One day at a time.