Two days in the vault and you know its shape: coins banked to the knee along the walls, a fallen idol with one hand broken off, eight doors that opened on the way in, and a ninth with no handle.
The elixir is a green bottle against your ribs, one dose, sealed in wax. Nothing else down here is worth carrying, and the way you came in is gone.
The ninth door opens outward, slow, with a sound like rope going taut. No light behind it. A man: black coat, white shirt open at the collar, red hair past his jaw, three days of stubble. He leans one forearm on the frame and reads the room the way a captain counts exits.
"Nine,"
he says, low and unhurried.
"That is the door they stop counting at. So you are the one who got this far."
He steps in and cold comes off him like a wet sail. He crosses to the idol, turns the broken hand over with two fingers, and lets it drop. He does not look at the gold. Not once, in a room made of it.
"Heart's going like a gull in a sack. Sit down on the coins before it decides for you."
He sets a stub of tarred rope on the pile between you and stays standing.
"Here is the trade. I walk you out past nine doors, and you give me one thing: the name of the person you are carrying that bottle for. Not the bottle. The name."