Chapter 127: The Price of an E-Rank Core

The quay at Port Myrrh was made of white stone, and every block of it was worth more than Lantern Street.

Aren came down the gangway behind Rook with his hood up, into a noise of carts, gulls and bells, and under it all the sound of money changing hands.

The first stall at the foot of the gangway sold cores.

It was a plank on two barrels, with an old woman behind it shelling beans into a bowl, and on the plank lay twenty E-rank cores in a row like apples at a market. A sailor from the next ship picked one up, tossed a copper and two small coins onto the plank, and walked off rolling it between his fingers. Aren stopped dead in the middle of the quay.

In Highcrest, an E-rank core was nearly a gold crown. He had once gone down into a Rift under a dye house for about ten of them, with his life on the table. Here an old woman sold them next to her beans, and nobody bothered to steal them.

"Close your mouth," Rook said, without stopping. "You look like a farmer at his first fair."

"What does she want for them?"

"What they’re worth here. Where you come from is poor."

He had felt this on the trading floor in his first life, on the mornings when a whole market had priced something wrong and only he could see it. A man who saw that and walked past deserved to stay poor.

He put a handful of coppers on the plank and took six cores. The old woman counted the coins without looking up from her beans.

’Six cores for the price of a bad lunch. I don’t know yet what I’ll burn them in, but I know I’ll burn them.’

He caught up with Rook halfway down the quay. His head was quieter than it had been on the ship, but not quiet. A porter swung a bale of cloth onto his back with a twist of the hip, and Aren’s own hips knew the move before he had finished looking. A thread of blood ran out of his nose. He wiped it on his sleeve and kept walking.

’Two days ago, that would have put me on the deck. The body’s catching up.’

On the wall of the customs house, between a notice about fever in the lower town and a price list for salt, somebody had pasted a drawing he recognized: a white mask with a crack across one cheek, and a cap with a bell on it. Under it, in Imperial letters and then in the trade tongue, ran a line of print. REN, THE BLOOD THIEF. WANTED ALIVE BY THE IRON THRONE. THREE THOUSAND CROWNS. Beside the mask, someone had drawn a face, but the damp had run it into a grey smear. Solvane and the Iron Throne traded thieves the same way they traded salt.

’Kaela drew my face herself, from the mine. She gave them the mask too, crack and all. The rain smeared this one. Next port, it won’t.’

He walked past it with his hood up, and nobody gave him a second glance.

The gate at the end of the quay was a wall with an arch in it, and the arch was full of crystals.

There were six of them in iron frames along a stone counter, each taller than a man. One by one the new arrivals laid their hands on the glass, the crystal lit, and a scribe wrote in a ledger and handed over a band from a tray, iron mostly, now and then a bronze. Beside the counter stood a smaller door, and two men with clubs.

"The Measure," Rook said quietly. "Everyone who comes into Solvane puts his hand on the glass. It reads rank and class, and you wear what they give you or you hang." He tilted his head toward a passage beside the gate, where Reyna Sall stood talking to a man in a customs coat with a silver band on his shoulder. "Reyna has an arrangement, if you’d rather not. You’d come out with no band and spend your whole time in this country avoiding glass."

Aren looked at the man in the customs coat. Silver band, Rank B, a fat purse on his belt, and a smile for Reyna that he would give anything to anyone who paid.

’If I go around the glass, I’m a man hiding something, in a country where hiding is the crime. If I go through it, I find out what they see. And the crystal in Highcrest saw a Servant. Glass is glass.’

"I’ll take the glass."

The man in front of him was a sailor with a bronze band already on his shoulder, bought in some other port. He put his hand on the glass, and it read Rank E. The two men with clubs took him by the elbows and walked him through the small door, and nobody in the line turned to watch.

Aren put his hand flat on the crystal.

He felt it look at him. It was older and stronger than the crystal in Highcrest, and it went deep, looking for the bottom. It found the six finished stages and counted them. It slid around the edge of the ring behind his breastbone and stayed there, turning, looking for a color that wasn’t there. The scribe’s pen stopped. By the small door, one of the club men looked up.

Then the glass found what the old crystal had found, and stopped there.

Rank C.

And under it, in the same faint grey letters he had seen in the Great Hall: Class: Servant.

The scribe looked at the letters, then at Aren, and frowned.

"A Servant at Rank C," he said. "Who paid for it?"

Aren kept quiet, because he had no idea what the question meant, and the scribe took the silence for an answer. He wrote in the ledger without bothering to hide it: Servant class, Rank C, foreign, purchased.

"Your master must love you dearly," the scribe said, and dropped a band of bronze on the counter. "Or he’s a fool with a lot of pills. Wear it on the left. Next!"

On the far side of the arch, Rook fell in beside him.

"Purchased," he repeated, delighted. "A Servant doesn’t reach Rank C in a lifetime without pills. Somebody fed you pill by pill, and the scribe thinks your owner is an idiot." He fastened the band on Aren’s shoulder himself, with quick fingers. "Congratulations, stone-seller. You just walked into Solvane as the most expensive mistake on the quay."

The street out of the gate was hung with little flags, sea-green and silver, already sagging and dirty. Half the shop fronts still had paper moons pasted in their windows. A boy at the corner was selling cheap prints off a string, and he shouted the same line over and over at everyone who came through the arch.

"The Moon Bride! The Moon Bride of Aldermere, one copper!"

Aren bought one.

It was badly printed on grey paper, a girl in white with a crescent over her head and a dog at her feet, and it didn’t look like her at all. Under it, in small type, someone had printed the news for people who couldn’t afford a news sheet. The tribute of Aldermere had landed at Port Myrrh on the morning tide, two days ago. House Sarkhane had met her on the quay with two Rank B lords. She had been put straight into a Sarkhane coach and taken up the Pale Road the same day, nine days to Aurem, with an escort of a hundred riders and twelve wagons of dowry behind her.

He folded the print and put it inside his shirt.

Reyna’s crew had rooms above a ropewalk in the lower town, a long shed where men twisted rope all day. In the evening Rook climbed out of the window onto the roof with a bottle and two cups, and Aren followed him. The roofs went up the hill in red tile as far as he could see, with lamps coming on below and the harbor black and full of ship lights.

Rook poured. "You came south to run, which is sensible. You’re not a sensible man, so I’ll ask. Why the south?"

"The north wants to hang me."

"So does the south, if they find out what you are. That’s one reason." Rook held out a cup. "And the other one went up the Pale Road two days ago in a white coach."

Aren took the cup and said nothing.

Rook waited. The bells on the hill rang the hour, one tower after another, and when the last one stopped, the old fence shrugged and drank.

"Good. A man who can keep his mouth shut in Solvane might live a month." He set his cup down on the tile. "Second thing in a year you’ve kept from me that I couldn’t guess. I find I don’t mind."

[Rook. Hostility: 68% → 64%.]

"Tell me about the people Reyna works for."

Rook leaned back on his elbows. "Every thief and fence on this coast owes them money. Reyna takes us to them tomorrow. Be careful what you ask them for."

’I won’t ask at all.’

Aren looked up the hill, past the roofs, to where the lamps stopped and a long pale road went south between the dark fields, toward the middle of the continent.

He had a bronze band, six cores and a few coins. To steal one chest from a dowry the Emperor was guarding, he would need the best thieves in Solvane on his side, and he would need to be better than all of them.

’Nine days up the Pale Road. She’ll be inside the palace before I’ve learned the names of the streets. Fine. Since I learn fast now.’

He drank.

"One more thing," Rook said, looking at the harbor. "Every scribe at the Measure sells a copy of his ledger to the House before he goes home."

He picked up the bottle.

"They’ve read you already."