The coffee repaid the wait. I drew in the steam and took the first swallow slowly, and the bitterness broke over my tongue and found the palate in that particular way only a high-grade bean, properly brewed, ever manages. I permit myself few indulgences. This one I defend.

Colinton would keep its peace for another hour yet. I had settled on the veranda with the tablet and the overnight news, a reliable index of what people would be paying to know by the week’s end, while the early June sun already stood over the garden wall, laying long bars of light between the shrubs. Down in the Dell the dawn chorus had spent its first fury and settled into housekeeping. Soon the main road would fill with the commuter growl, the neighbouring houses would let out their morning noise, and the bees would get about the lavender.

For the moment, though, the whole suburb held still. Exactly as I preferred it.

This morning hour was the one entry I kept off my own books: Pandora performing her own silent maintenance, the feeds dark, the house’s eyes turned politely away. Sixty unmonitored minutes in which nothing was priced and nothing was answered. An analyst would have called the arrangement a vulnerability. I called it overheads.

“Someone is approaching, Alex.”

Pandora’s voice arrived through the implant, bypassing the morning.

“What?” She had not broken our house rules once in seven years.

“Unknown. The satellite agent flagged it high.”

My hand slipped into the pocket of my hoodie and settled on the grip of the small pistol that resides there – a modified Beretta Px4 Storm SubCompact. I swept the garden, the fence line, the empty street beyond. Nothing. Then the engines reached me, and they were not the commuter kind. Two cars came around the corner in close order – black S-Classes, every window smoked dark, the bodywork matte and sitting heavy on its springs. Armoured, I would have wagered, well past factory. They slowed and stopped nose to tail before my house.

The front passenger door of the lead car opened, and a thick-necked, massive sort in a black suit worked himself out of it with some effort and stood surveying the street from under heavy brows: slowly, with method, missing nothing.

Bodyguard.

Finding no direct threat, the hired muscle murmured a word to no one visible, and four more of nearly identical manufacture let themselves out of the second car, distributed themselves along my fence line with the economy of long practice, and went still, the way switched-off machinery is still. No sway in them, no settling of weight, none of the small tide of breath. The idle comparison, I filed, was only partly a comparison.

The first one moved to the rear of his own vehicle and swung the passenger door wide.

The man who stepped out was older, silver threaded through his hair and his beard, both groomed to the millimetre. His suit was worth more than all four of theirs together: a deep aubergine broken with black, the sort of colour a man wears when he has stopped requiring anyone’s approval. He did not survey the street. He did not glance at his men. He crossed to my garden gate as though returning to his own property after a brief absence, let himself through, and came up the paved path between the box hedges without waiting to be asked.

I did not know this man, and I was expecting no one, and I have never been fond of visitors who treat my home as a thoroughfare. Whatever the satellite made of him, nothing in the arrangement outside read as a hostile call. But in my line of work there is no such number as too careful.

He caught sight of me then, watching him over the rim of the cup with a face I had emptied of everything and no intention whatsoever of rising. He smiled slightly, lifted one hand in greeting, and kept coming along the path’s lazy curve as though the gesture settled the matter of his welcome. Behind him the first bodyguard had fetched a small black briefcase from the car and was hurrying to catch his employer up. They reached the foot of my steps inside the minute. I stayed where I was, hand where it was, and gave the pair one raised eyebrow between them.

“Alexander Dark!” the older man said. The voice was deep, the Russian in it unhidden. “You look considerably younger than I expected.”

He said it lightly, a note of amusement riding the arrogance, like a man in possession of an excellent joke the rest of us had failed to understand. The antipathy arrived at once, and it annoyed me that I couldn’t immediately locate its cause. The nearest I could place it: here was a man accustomed to dominating whatever he touched, whose words expected to be received as orders. Hostile or not – the account refused to settle – this was not a man to relax in front of.

“Have we met?” I held his eyes while I asked it.

“No, we have not. But I have heard a great deal about you. My name is Igor Brohsov.” He gestured at the second chair across the coffee table. “You do not object, I hope?”

He barely waited out my nod before drawing the chair back and seating himself opposite. His bodyguard took my measure in one pass, crown to shoe, then posted himself at his employer’s right shoulder and a half-step behind. The stance did the introductions for him: armed, and prepared to produce the fact at short notice.

Brohsov… Brohsov? The name had a familiar weight, but no file answered it.

“What can I do for you, Mr Brohsov?” I glanced at my watch. “At twenty to six in the morning.”

“That is not so early for people like you and me.” He gave a short laugh and sat back. His gaze dropped to my right hand, still in the pocket of the hoodie. “There is no need for that. I am here only to talk business.”

I ran the numbers before answering. The honest answer first; the polite one after. The old arithmetic – a round through the big man’s thigh to fold him, a second to retire him, the muzzle on his principal before the fence line resolved – was worthless against muscle of that grade. The dermal weave runs deepest where the killing shots land. Centre mass on such men is a donation. That left the narrow economies, the eye or the hinge of the jaw, one seated shot through a hoodie pocket against reflexes I had to assume were bought and paid for like the rest of him; and even then the play priced out thin. Possible. Unprofitable. Ten years ago the same play would have favoured me without argument. The world kept upgrading around me while I stayed factory-standard, and I filed that under matters to correct. Then came the complications attending any version in which I fired first, of which questions from the local authorities would have been the least.

“And what business would that be?” The hand stayed where it was.

“As you wish.” Brohsov sighed as though I had mildly disappointed him, shrugged, and considered the matter closed. His bodyguard considered it rather less closed: the frown came down, the stance tightened a notch. I declined to notice either. “The business is this. I want you to find something for me, Mr Dark. An object of singular value.”

A working call, then, if an unscheduled one. I hadn’t received clients on my own property in years – it carried risks I preferred not to buy – but a handful of my older acquaintances knew the address, and I had never traded with Brohsov directly. He’d have had it from one of them. A problem for later.

“Who pointed you to me, exactly?”

“A mutual acquaintance.” His lips curved into that particular thin smile. “He warned me you are not a man who gives his trust easily. His name is Timothy Myers.”

“In my profession, Mr Brohsov, that’s standard practice.” It was not the name I’d expected. Myers was a rat and hid like one, but he sent serious clients my way whenever there was profit in it for him. I decided the moment could bear a gesture of goodwill, took my hand off the grip, and arranged myself into something deliberately looser. “All right. Tell me more about what you’re looking for.”

He nodded, satisfied with the course of the proceedings.

“It concerns an ancient tome,” Brohsov began, “and once, a long time ago, it belonged to my family. Its name is in Old Slavonic, and it translates, roughly, as The Mothers of the Night. I do not know exactly where it is at present. But I have a trail that could be followed – by a man with your talents. In fact, I am convinced you are the right man for this work.”

That was not exactly so. My business was information: pulled out of books, documents, servers, and on occasion out of carved stone, but the information and only that. The work often meant research and tracing, sometimes the acquiring of a source or of access to one; that was internal process, not a service I advertised. Too much risk in it. Hunting objects on commission was a line I did not cross, and the rules of the practice had been paid for before I ever wrote them down.

“Mr Brohsov, all of this sounds genuinely intriguing, but I’m an information broker. I don’t trade in artefact recovery or anything of the—”

“On the contrary, I think you do.” He cut across me without ceremony. “From what I have learned about you, I believe you are exceptionally good at acquiring anything at all that you happen to need.” His eyes pinned mine, the ironic smile fixed in place as though lacquered there. “Am I not right, Mr Dark?”

Who the devil was this man? He had gone through me the way I go through other people, and I hadn’t felt the fingers doing it. Against my preference, the portrait of antipathy took on a stroke of respect – it was, after all, precisely what I would have done in his place. Worse: he had surprised me. That happens rarely, and I had yet to learn to enjoy it.

“Even if that were so,” I said, keeping the voice level, “I’m still not convinced this is work I care to take.”

“Three million euros. Cash, untraceable notes. Half a million in advance. And I will cover any additional expenses.”

The objections I had been arranging lost their order. Three million? Not a figure a careful man waves away. And yet:

“The fee seems excessive. For one book.”

“It carries great sentimental value. I can easily afford the sum. And I am aware that a man of your reputation is an expensive resource.”

I let my gaze drift out over the garden and brought my fingertips together while the morning rearranged itself around the offer. Brohsov’s appearance had come from nowhere, and the shape of the thing was too good to be the whole truth. I still didn’t know what he weighed or where he stood; the entourage and the manner said enough to be going on with. I needed more information before anything else. And the only available source of it was sitting on my veranda, waiting, with every appearance of patience, to be asked.

Pandora put her findings into the pause.

“Igor Brohsov, Alex. Born Vyborg, ‘seventy-eight; resident in Poland since 2012. Lithium and nickel, extraction to refining, and a spread of scarcer metals. The record is thick and recent. Before 2012 it thins to almost nothing.”

I did not so much as blink at the delivery. A metals magnate with a documented decade and an undocumented life, paying three million for sentiment. The word had cost him nothing to say, and it did not survive contact with the file. I set the observation aside and asked my question.

“All right, Mr Brohsov. Tell me more about this book of yours.”

He smiled as though the question had arrived on schedule, and elected to answer it with one of his own.

“What do you know about the Mothers of the Night, Mr Dark?”

He was not asking about the book. I went through what the years had shelved for me under the old Slavic world – a thin shelf; little of that world survives on paper at all – and after a moment something rose to meet him.

“Weren’t they a pagan cult? Early mediaeval. Local to the Polish lands.”

“A pagan cult, yes,” he confirmed. “But far from merely local. Before the Christian faith took Eastern Europe for its own – the tenth century, in the main – the cult reached from the Baltic and the lands of the Polish crown to the shores of the Black Sea and the country of the Bulgarians. A closed society. A secret one. But never a sealed one, Mr Dark. Their hand was in the daily life of those lands, and not only among the common folk.”

“That’s interesting,” I said, and meant it; this was the stratum I mined by preference, professionally and otherwise. “The name reads as night-worship. Deities of the night, or of something that belongs to it.”

“To a degree.” He resettled his collar; the sun had put on a few degrees since his convoy interrupted my morning. “The night, and the old goddesses held to rule it, that was the cult’s devotion, yes. But the name keeps two meanings. Most take it at first hearing, as a title of dominion: the Mothers of the Night, queens of the dark hours and of everything bred in them. Spoken in a certain context, however, it reads another way. Literally.”

“The Mothers of the Night.” I turned the phrase over, hunting the second sound in it, and after a moment it arrived. “A statement of parentage. The ones who bear it. Who give the dark its birth.”

Brohsov nodded, and smiled, and offered nothing further. Somewhere beyond the wall the first commuter engine went by, alone, and the suburb pretended not to wake.

I eased back and lifted the cup, buying an interval to think.

My head pulsed once, behind the eyes.

And across the bright morning air between us the ghost-script rose – a long procession of it, character after character in that painfully familiar alphabet I have never read a word of, as dense as I had seen it in years. Strong signal. I kept the cup at my lip and did nothing while it passed. When it comes that dense, the matter in front of me matters; and the rest of the reading – how much of what I had just heard was true, and what had been carved away before it reached me – would ordinarily resolve alongside. This time it refused. Importance beyond question, authenticity unpriced. That had not happened in a long while.

“The title returns nothing, Alex.” Pandora again, quiet inside my ear. “No catalogue, no auction record, no digitised mention on a fast pass. I’ve started the deep runs.”

A book the script marked important and the record said did not exist. In my trade, the distance between those two verdicts is called margin.

The old beliefs kept night close to the eternal dark, and the eternal dark close to death; their Marena held patronage over both. So what had these Mothers been, that their name could be spoken in two directions – and their priestesses, what had they actually been for? Brohsov knew a great deal more than he was giving me. Either he did not intend to give it, or he was waiting for me to arrive at it on my own.

“Consider me strongly intrigued,” I said at last, opening my hands. “But I still don’t see the book’s part in anything you’ve told me.”

He did not hurry to answer. His gaze went out past the garden wall while he weighed, with visible care, how much of anything to hand me.

“The women of my line belonged to this cult,” he said at length. “For centuries, Mr Dark. The book is a kind of inherited diary of those women. Those priestesses. Generation upon generation set their lives down in it: their days, their workings, their secrets. It holds a great part of my family’s history, and testimony of the cult’s age and practice that exists nowhere else in this world. I think you understand why I am set on recovering it.”

Understand it? Almost nothing of the old Slavic world survives at first hand: no rite or prayer, no household charm in its own voice; what we hold was written down by other men, in other centuries, for other gods. Whether that world counted writing itself unclean, or the christened years simply burned what they found, the shelf stands empty either way. A first-voice artefact out of that silence was not rare. It was unprecedented – a category of one. Somewhere in the cataloguing my hands had picked up the faintest tremor, and I set the cup down before it could report me.

“I see in your eyes that you share my enthusiasm,” Brohsov offered.

Rather more of it than he knew.

“You mentioned a trail, Mr Brohsov.”

“I did.” He settled deeper into the chair, a man arriving at the part of the story he had rehearsed. “Almost a year ago, I began a construction project – on family land, as it happens: old parcels, reacquired over the years – and in breaking the ground my people uncovered a grave. An old one. It proved to be the resting place of one of my ancestors. Among the goods buried with him was a ceremonial shield, bronze, carrying inscriptions in the Old Slavonic letters. And in those inscriptions, Mr Dark, we found the book. Mentioned by name.”

“We?”

“The archaeological team I retain.” He said it the way other men refer to their car. “Dr Hammerstein and his assistants have spent the past several months cleaning and restoring a considerable part of the tomb. The work continues. I believe it will produce a wonderful result in due course. But for me, the book comes first.”

“Entirely understandable, Mr Brohsov.” It was. The book came first for me as well.

“The archaeologists’ expertise lies elsewhere,” he continued. “Which is why the team requires a man like you to complete it. I would like you to speak with them, and to examine the inscriptions on the shield with your own eyes. I am no expert myself, and I would not wish to press my illiterate guesses upon a mind of your quality.”

“That’s genuinely far-sighted of you.” Precious few clients have the discipline to keep their theories to themselves before a contract, let alone after one.

The lacquered smile came back, and he left the next question where he had set it. I picked it up. The whole conversation had been arranged so that I would.

“So where is this shield?”

“In my personal estate, near Kraków. I permit no photographs of it, and it does not leave my vault.” He looked me straight in the eyes, and for the first time that morning the amusement stepped aside for something with weight behind it. “I hope you like to travel, Mr Dark.”

Kraków.

The word went in like a shelfmark. Somewhere in the private stacks of my memory, the one collection Pandora holds no key to, a drawer slid out, and Brohsov’s file came into the light – unabridged, this time. The metals magnate was, in certain unindexed circles, the man you approached when a private collection required additions of a very particular provenance: a Roman bust last catalogued in a Temple of Jupiter, or a necklace out of a Fourth Dynasty burial that no museum would ever admit to missing. Special commissions, invitation-only auctions, a market with no shopfront and a door fee of the right friends, the right silences, and serious money. The dossier had been built around the operation rather than the man; his name was spent sparingly there, and Kraków was the index it lived under. Our orbits had never quite crossed. But what I recalled now was enough to explain everything currently arranged on my property: the armour, the manufactured muscle, three million offered the way other men offer bus fare.

And one figure in this idyllic suburban painting said more than all the canvas around it: a man with that much delegation at his disposal had come in person, at dawn, to a foreign country, to hire me himself. Whatever this book was to him, it was not mere sentiment.

Which made this, in the end, a deal I could not refuse. Even if I had wanted to.

“Travel won’t be a problem, Mr Brohsov – especially with you covering the additional expenses.”

“Of course.” He turned to the bodyguard at his shoulder. “Vanya.”

The big man stepped around, set the black briefcase on the coffee table between us, thumbed the locks, and turned it open to face me. Used hundred-euro notes, banded, stack upon stack of that unmistakable green. I looked from the money to Brohsov.

“I like to arrive prepared for every outcome, Mr Dark.” A shrug, entirely without weight. “Half a million, as promised.”

I did not count it. At his altitude the advance is never short; the insult would cost more than the money. “Very well, Mr Brohsov.” I closed the case. “You have my exclusive services for the term of this contract.”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” He rose and put out his hand. “I will expect you in Kraków in three days. My boys will collect you from the airport.”

I rose as well and took the offered hand. It was dry, and the grip was a statement of policy. Like him or not, the man across my coffee table was now my employer, an arrangement that had appeared on no forecast of mine when I woke.

“I’ll be there.”

He nodded once and went back down the path without another word, done with me the moment the business concluded. Vanya gave me one last unhurried, expressionless read, then followed, hurrying only at the end to have the car door open before his employer reached it.

I watched the convoy out of sight from the veranda rail, the wrought iron cold from the night under my hands, and ran the morning’s audit while the street was still mine. The unknowns outnumbered the knowns, and by more than I cared for. Brohsov had handed me half a story at best, and the withheld half would surface the way it always does in arrangements of this kind – too late, sideways, and at someone’s expense.

“Shall I bring the feeds back up, Alex?”

I let the question stand. The hour was long over, and Pandora had it timed to the second; some audits want no witnesses. Beyond the practical complications, there was also the structural matter. I had sold to dangerous men my entire career. Selling is a clean line: goods one way, money the other, both parties strangers again by nightfall. This was not selling. For the term of one contract I had folded myself into the organisation of a Russian mafia boss – a class of client I had, until this morning, handled strictly through glass.

And still, beneath the caution, beneath the dislike, something older had its head up and was feeding. A book a man pays three million to chase and cannot bring himself to describe. A name the record refuses to hold. What was actually in it? The coffee had gone cold in the cup, and I hadn’t noticed, and that told me more than anything Brohsov had said. The account was open now. On the books of Igor Brohsov – and he on mine.