He went on a Friday night when the Row was loud enough to cover movement and quiet enough that nobody was looking at anything specific.

  He had been planning it for two weeks. Not obsessively, just the way he planned everything, in the background, adding details as they became available, checking the plan against new information and adjusting where adjustment was needed. By Friday he had adjusted it enough times that what remained was clean and he trusted it.

  He went alone.

  He had considered telling Flint. Had decided against it. Not because he did not trust Flint but because whatever was in that building was connected to things he had not yet told Flint about and going in together would have required explaining those things first and he was not ready to explain them yet. The Metarealm. Yegmet. The pyramid. The whole architecture of his private life that ran parallel to everything else.

  He was not ready.

  So he went alone.

  The alley behind the boarded shopfront was narrow and dark in the specific way of Underlayers alleys that had been narrow and dark for so long they had stopped being anything else. He moved through it without a lamp, his eyes adjusted, the glow from the Row providing just enough ambient light to navigate by.

  The back of the building had a door.

  Old wood, same age as the boards on the front, the same weathered grey. He looked at it for a moment and pushed a thread of mana into the lock mechanism the way he had pushed mana into the water pipe, feeling for the structure of it.

  The lock was simple. Older than simple. The kind of lock that had been adequate when the building was active and had not been updated since because nobody had thought anyone would need to update it.

  He opened it in under a minute.

  Inside was dark and cold and smelled like a place that had been closed for a long time. Dust, old wood, the particular staleness of air that had not moved in years.

  He stood in the doorway and listened.

  Nothing.

  He stepped in and pulled the door closed behind him and stood still while his eyes adjusted further.

  The ground floor was empty. Not empty as in cleared out, empty as in nothing had ever been here or whatever had been here had been removed so long ago that no impression of it remained. Bare floorboards, bare walls, a staircase at the far end going up.

  He moved to the staircase and listened again before going up.

  Nothing.

  The second floor was different.

  Not empty. Not exactly.

  There was a room at the top of the stairs that had been used recently. He knew this from the dust, or rather from the absence of it in specific places. The floor had been disturbed, the dust patterns broken in ways that were recent enough to still have definition. Someone had been in this room. More than once. The pattern of disturbance suggested multiple visits, each one going to the same area of the room, the far left corner near the window.

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  He went to the corner.

  The floorboards there were the same as everywhere else. Weathered, grey, fitted tightly together the way old floors were fitted. He crouched down and pushed mana into them the way he was learning to push mana into things, feeling for what was underneath.

  There was a space.

  Not large. A cavity under the floor, maybe half a meter deep, maybe a meter across. Whatever was in it was small enough to fit in the space and dense enough in its Metarealm presence to register clearly against the background of old wood and dead air.

  He felt around the edges of the boards with his fingers until he found the one that moved.

  It came up without resistance. Then the one beside it. Then a third.

  He looked into the space.

  A box.

  Stone, dark, the same dark stone as the pyramid in the Metarealm, which he recognized immediately and which made something in his chest do a thing he did not have a word for. Small enough to hold in both hands. No visible seam, no visible lid, no visible mechanism. Just a smooth dark surface with something carved into the top.

  He leaned closer to read the carving.

  The same script as the pyramid. The same script as the artifact label in the vault. He could read most of it now.

  It said: belonging to Yegmet Challots. Return to sender.

  He sat back on his heels and looked at it for a moment.

  Return to sender.

  He thought about the artifact in Burgalow Vermillion’s vault. The Eastern mage and the Western man across a table. The long distance the thing had traveled to end up in the lower Middling Ring. The careful label. The holding company. The building.

  Someone had sent this here deliberately. Or it had ended up here through a chain of hands each of which had not known fully what they were carrying. Either way it had been here for a long time, in this floor, in this building, waiting in the specific patient way of objects that did not have anywhere else to be.

  And Hedral Stillson had been looking for it.

  Zelig looked at the box without touching it.

  He thought about touching it. He thought about what touching something with his father’s name on it might do, in a world where his father’s realm existed and responded to things like rank advancement and emotional state and the particular shape of attention you brought to it.

  He decided not to touch it tonight.

  He put the floorboards back. Carefully, exactly as he had found them, the dust patterns as undisturbed as he could manage.

  He stood up.

  He looked at the corner for a moment.

  Then he went back down the stairs and out the back door and pulled it closed behind him and moved through the alley and onto the Row and walked home with his hands in his pockets and his mind running very fast and very quietly in the dark.

  Marie was asleep.

  He sat at the table and did not make tea. He just sat.

  The box had his father’s name on it.

  Hedral Stillson was looking for the box.

  Hedral Stillson was connected to the vault artifact which was connected to Eastern cultivation lineages from a closed province which was connected to the arrangement between an Eastern mage and a Western man which was connected to whatever King Amalak was building, the collection of dead gods’ artifacts, the feeding on fear and awe, the man on the horse riding through the Underlayers counting people.

  He did not have all the connections yet.

  But the shape of it was becoming visible the way the pyramid was becoming visible, piece by piece, rising out of the sand as he grew strong enough to see it.

  The son carries what the father cannot.

  He looked at his hands on the table.

  His father was a god and could not move directly against Amalak. That much he had understood for a while. What he had not understood until tonight, sitting at the table in the dark with his father’s name fresh in his eyes, was that the box in the floor was not just an artifact.

  It was something his father had put somewhere safe.

  Something he needed Zelig to find before Hedral Stillson did.

  He sat with that for a long time.

  Outside the Row had gone fully quiet, the deep quiet of the Underlayers after midnight when even the things that happened in the dark had found somewhere to happen.

  He needed to go back.

  He needed to take the box before Stillson found it.

  And he needed to understand what was inside it before he touched it.

  He went to bed.

  He did not sleep for a long time but when he did he slept deeply and without interruption and in the morning the plan was clearer than it had been the night before which was how it usually worked, the thinking continuing while he was not aware of it, delivering results he had not been present for.

  He lay in the early light and looked at the ceiling and thought: soon.

  Soon was tonight.