The storeroom was at the end of Corridor Three, behind two iron grate doors, sealed with enchanted ring-locks that ordinary force wouldn't touch. Pei Jin spent three days working out a single fact: how lazy the guard posted near it actually was.
Extremely.
Every time that mage completed his circuit to the storeroom door, he sat against the wall and slept for roughly one incense stick's worth of time before moving on. How long this had been his habit was unclear, but it was clearly known to his partner — the kind of arrangement two men fall into when neither will report the other.
Pei Jin didn't need to get inside the storeroom. He needed to reach the gate and see what the shelves held.
The opportunity came on the third evening.
Two subjects got into a fight over food — not unusual — and it escalated loud enough to draw both corridor patrols over to deal with it. Pei Jin stood in the crowd of onlookers for a moment, then moved against the current, toward Corridor Three.
Empty. Even the habitual sleeper had gone to watch. The storeroom's outer grate stood unguarded.
He walked to the first grate and looked through the bars.
Shelves of sealed clay jars, wax-stopped in two colours. Black wax on the left rank. Red wax on the right. Against the far wall, a wooden stand held apart from the rest — several metal-capped cylinders, and a stack of scrolls wrapped in plain cloth and cord.
He gave the jars three seconds, memorised their positions, turned and walked back. He was in his bunk before the crowd dispersed.
The black wax he recognised. That seal colour meant high-concentration alchemical compress — fortifying in small doses, lethal in anything more. The red wax he was less certain of, but the colour matched the injection from the third day.
The scrolls he hadn't been able to read the markings on, but the binding style looked like formulation records.
He set this aside and thought about what came next.
He had no tools. No allies. The first thing he needed was a key — specifically, one that could interact with an enchanted lock — or a person who carried one.
On this floor, only the mages and the senior handlers held that kind of access.
Handlers were easier to approach.
He began watching the corridor staff. Looking for the one who might be useful.
Two days. Then he found him.
A middle-aged man with a bad left leg, each step a beat slower on that side. He carried a ring of keys on his hip — among the ordinary iron, one small silver key that shivered faintly with residual enchantment. He made three passes through the corridor each day: morning and evening for meals, midday to check the cells.
On the midday pass he always stopped at the far end of the corridor longer than the others. Like he was waiting for someone. Or hiding from something.
Pei Jin watched that detail for two more days before he understood. The man was meeting someone. Someone else was moving through the corridor's blind end, out of sightline.