The guards waved Rupert through into the city - or perhaps town was a better word. He estimated probably only five thousand people lived here. He immediately had to step around a rivulet of sewage running down the center of the street. The stench was overwhelming - a mix of human waste, rotting food, and stagnant water. What caught his engineer's eye wasn't just the decay, but the bones of what had once been impressive infrastructure.

The streets were once properly graded and carefully paved with fitted stones, designed to channel water and waste - but now they were buckled and broken, creating pools of filth. Above, he could see the remains of terra cotta pipes in the gutters that had once been part of a sophisticated water management system. Street fountains still flowed with clean water from some underground source, their basins crowded with people filling jugs and buckets.

The buildings told a similar story of decline. Many were clearly decades or even centuries old. They sagged and leaned against each other like wounded soldiers. Wooden patches covered holes in brick walls, and makeshift wooden additions teetered precariously on upper floors. Here and there, he spotted details of solid arch work, intricate frescos, and ventilation pipes all crumbling into ruin.

The Exarch's palace dominated the city - a heavy stone building that had clearly once been something else, perhaps a temple given its proportions. Armed guards in better equipment than the gate watchmen stood at its doors, alert and suspicious.

"Excuse me," he asked a woman carrying water from one of the fountains, "could you direct me to the Sleepy Drink?"

She pointed toward the forum - an open market square in front of the palace. Like the rest of Vranograd, the space held echoes of former grandeur. Columns lined the square like the teeth of a boxer, many broken or missing. Pop-up market stalls crowded between them, selling a limited selection of food and goods. Caravaners and wagons gathered in a courtyard nearby underneath a long green pennant whipping in the cold wind.

The tavern wasn't hard to spot - a three-story brick building with a faded sign showing a sleeping drunk cradling a cup. Its location in the forum, right under the palace guards' noses, probably explained why it had survived while other businesses had failed. Several dark alleys branched off from the main square, and Rupert noticed how the locals hurried past them, even in daylight.

The single copper in his pocket felt very inadequate. He needed to find this Magister Hou quickly and figure out his next move before night fell. At least the tavern's central location meant he was unlikely to get robbed between here and there - though given the state of the city, he suspected that was a rather low bar for safety.

The tavern's interior was dim and smoky, but cleaner than Rupert expected. The interior walls were blackened from decades of smoke. The bartender, a burly man with impressive mustaches, looked up from wiping a cup and immediately frowned.

"Whatever you're selling, we don't want it," he said flatly. "Got enough pretty boys and runaway apprentices causing trouble already."

"Actually," Rupert said, "I'm a loremaster. I'm looking for Magister Hou."

The bartender's expression shifted from dismissal to suspicion. "You from the capital?"

"No, I'm from... outside the empire, actually." Rupert realized he should probably know this, but... "Which is...?"

“Foreigner?” The bartender's eyebrows rose. "You're in Vranikos Province, in the far northwest of the Empire of Acharion." He studied Rupert's face for a reaction. "And you're a long way from anywhere that knows anything, aren't you? Well, sit in that corner there." He jerked his thumb toward a shadowy table. "If Hou wants to talk to you, he'll talk. No guarantees."

Rupert spent his last copper on a plate of bread, cheese, and an unknown spiced meat in walnut sauce, along with a cup of highly tannic red wine. He'd chosen the wine over water after seeing the state of the city's plumbing.

He was halfway through his meal when the tavern's door creaked open. The man who entered was small and wiry, with a long white beard. His wool robes might once have been impressive, but now they were stained and patched. He staggered slightly as he walked.

The bartender caught the newcomer's attention and pointed toward Rupert's corner. The old man's bloodshot eyes narrowed as he studied Rupert, then widened slightly in what might have been recognition or surprise. He ordered two drinks for himself and walked over, moving with the careful steps of a man trying to not look drunk.

"You are either most obvious spy I have ever seen, or something far more intriguing." He pulled out a chair with his foot and sat down without waiting for an invitation. "I am Magister Hou. And you are?”

"I'm Rupert Wright," Rupert said, "Uh… loremaster. I believe I could be of use to you."

"Oh?" Hou's eyebrows rose. "And how exactly would you be of use to me?" He drank his wine deliberately, like a man who had already achieved his optimal level of intoxication and was carefully maintaining it.

"I have... unique perspectives on the natural world."

“Aiyah,” Hou snorted. "You say you loremaster?" Without warning, he produced an ancient instrument from his robes. It was very old, its brass surfaces corroded to a dull green. There was something missing from an empty socket in the center, and the rim was bent. "What this?"

Rupert leaned forward to examine it, squinting slightly as he tried to focus on the faded details. And then something... shifted.

It was like unfocusing his eyes, except instead of things going blurry, they became painfully sharp in a way that had nothing to do with conventional optics. The astrolabe’s outline dissolved into streams of vibrating colors - but 'colors' was an inadequate word for what he was seeing. These were patterns of energy and atomic structure made visible, like a mass spectrometer's output translated directly into his visual cortex.

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He could see the copper-zinc alloy of the original brass blazing in complex lattices, the isotopic half-life ratios telling him this was no modern material but something from centuries ago. Trace elements formed distinctive patterns - silver, tin, even minute quantities of gold in the original etching. The corrosion bloomed over his hands like slow-motion fireworks, copper carbonates and oxides forming fractal patterns of decay.

It was an astrolabe, a device for measuring the movements of stars in the heavens. He could even perceive the original angle engravings faintly beneath. This one was particularly sophisticated. Not only a star chart, but it appeared to also have analog computation functions inscribed on the surface too.

Then came the threads of music. Energies that his brain interpreted as sounds - a high, pure tone like crystal being struck - wove through the metal's structure, humming at a frequency that made his teeth ache, creating interference patterns with the normal atomic vibrations. The astrolabe wasn't just an astronomical instrument; it had been made for measuring something else, something that left traces his newly enhanced senses could barely comprehend.

The experience was overwhelming. Rupert blinked hard, trying to restore normal vision, but the view persisted for several seconds before finally snapping back to normal. He felt a headache building behind his eyes. He could see Hou watching him intently, the old man's body an unreadable arrangement of organic molecules - greens, browns, and yellows, with a massive spike of black that had to be elemental carbon.

"You go cross-eyed," Hou said. His tone had changed, becoming far less drunk-sounding. "You trying not fart?”

Rupert gripped the edge of the table, fighting down a wave of vertigo and nausea as his brain struggled to process the dual input. "I... it's an astrolabe," he managed. "It’s old. Really old. But there's something else... something in the metal itself..."

"Ah!" Hou said, his manner shifting subtly from confrontational to carefully casual. "And what do you see in metal, exactly?" His eyes studied Rupert with an intensity that suggested he wasn't nearly as drunk as he appeared.

"There's some kind of... resonance. A high-pitched sound, almost." Rupert tried to describe it without revealing too much.

"That magic," Hou said matter-of-factly.

"That's nonsense. There's no such thing as magic. It has to be some kind of quantum-level interaction or-"

"Aiyaaa! You say there no magic. Right after you just say you sense thaumaturgical resonance in metal. Northern barbarian," Hou interrupted. "But never mind. Watch this."

He produced a copper cylinder from the sleeve of his robe. It was about the size of a small flashlight with geometric patterns etched into its surface. Hou placed one end against the astrolabe and flicked a tiny switch on its side.

Rupert's vision shifted involuntarily back to the atomic level. He watched - and heard - as the crystalline tone emanating from the astrolabe diminished, flowing like a single drop of liquid light into the cylinder. The molecular structure of the copper container sang as it absorbed the tiny amount of energy transferred. The astrolabe turned inert.

"Fascinating," Hou muttered, more to himself than Rupert. "The Exarch pay for this one, maybe."

"Why?" Rupert asked, still blinking away afterimages and rubbing his forehead. "It's broken. You don't even have the star charts that would make it functional as an astronomical instrument."

Hou waved a hand dismissively. "Oh, it's not astrolabe. It's an ancient magic mirror. Once I polish it." He gave a crooked-tooth grin. "Has gift of telling future if you hold it to dead sun just so without blinding yourself. Exarch Alexios love ancient artifacts."

"That's-" Rupert stopped himself from saying 'fraud.' He was in no position to make enemies right now. "That's a creative interpretation."

"You wise man." Hou leaned forward. "You know, man with your unique perspectives could be quite valuable here in Vranograd. Exarch pay well for interesting discoveries. We come to an arrangement - I provide local expertise and connections, you provide fresh insight. Mutually beneficial partnership."

The offer was clear: become an accomplice rather than a competitor. Rupert considered his empty wallet and the deteriorated city outside. "I would be very interested in learning more about local research opportunities."

"Excellent!" Hou's grin widened and he ordered more wine for the two of them. "First lesson: never admit you see magic. Makes fools nervous. May try to burn you as witch. Second lesson: the Exarch pay triple for artifacts he can send back to capital and flip at antique shows."

Hou waved to the bartender for more wine and meat. "Archaeology business booming," he explained, pouring generously for both of them. "Refugees dig up and bring in whatever they can find to sell. The hunters bring in items from the old ruins - dangerous work, but profitable if survive. And of course, caravanners come through with artifacts from all over the empire."

Rupert noticed that despite appearing to drink heavily, Hou's cup seemed to empty more slowly than his own. "And these artifacts... they all have that resonance?"

"Few do, most don't. The interesting ones usually sing." Hou studied him over the rim of his cup. "Where are you staying?"

"I..." Rupert looked down at his dirty white shirt. "Nowhere, currently."

Hou burst out laughing. "A penniless scholar! How traditional! Well, come on then. You can sleep by my stove. Better than getting stabbed in alley."

Rupert's head was swimming by the time they left the tavern. The red sun had set, leaving only the strange moon Skathos casting irregular shadows through the streets. He stumbled slightly, but Hou moved with that same uncanny grace, weaving through the darkened alleys without hesitation.

What struck Rupert was how people reacted to Hou's presence. In the tavern, he'd seemed like a harmless drunk, but out here people actively backed away. Even the shadows in certain doorways - shadows that definitely contained criminals - retreated at their approach. One particularly dark alley actually emptied ahead of them, figures melting away like smoke.

"Why're they so afraid of you?" Rupert slurred slightly.

"Me? I'm just humble magister," Hou said cheerfully. "Who occasionally renders troublemakers into gutter oil. Or so they say. Can't imagine where they got that idea."

They ended up at a small shack built against the outer wall of the Exarch's palace - a strategic location that combined maximum protection with minimal rent, Rupert's engineer brain noted that even through the wine. The interior was clean, though cluttered with books, strange apparatus, and a still.

"Floor all yours," Hou said, producing a blanket from a basket. "Try not to knock over my distilling apparatus. Some secret ingredients quite corrosive to cloth and flesh.”

Rupert was drunk enough that sleeping on a wooden floor with nothing but a wool blanket seemed perfectly reasonable. As he drifted off, he could have sworn he heard Hou muttering something about "good man is hard to find" and "testing protocols for new batch," but that was probably just the wine talking.