Chapter 136: Grade Five

The hall of the Veil counting house had been built to impress people, and on the morning of the Assay it was full.

There were galleries on three sides, packed with merchants and ship’s captains and their wives, and on the floor below them, in a long row, stood nine benches with nine furnaces, one for each pill house in Port Myrrh. At the far end, on a platform hung with Veil green, sat the judges. In front of them, on a brass stand as tall as a man, stood the Bureau’s glass, a disc of pale crystal as big as a cart wheel.

Beside the glass, with a ledger on her knee, sat a plain woman of forty with a silver band on her shoulder and her hair pinned up hard.

"Sefa Lorne," Reyna said quietly, from the gallery rail above Aren. "Bureau of Bands. The Veils and the Sarkhanes both trust her with a number."

Aren looked at the woman by the glass, and found that she was already looking at him.

She held his eyes. Then she wrote one line in her ledger, without hurrying, and turned back to the glass.

[Sefa Lorne. Rank B. Hostility: 0%.]

The Blue Mortar’s bench was the last in the row. Seren stood at it in a long grey hood that hid everything but her hands. Nobody in the hall had looked at her twice. All the eyes were on the first bench, where Tarquin Veil stood in green and gold with three Veil pressers behind him, laughing at something one of the judges had said.

Above the judges, in gold paint, ran the first rule of the Assay: One maker, one pair of hands. ’No copies out of the fire, then.’ If the hall knew a Crucible stood under that hood, the judges would count her hands all morning. Under it, she was a woman from a cough-drop shop.

Up in the gallery, in the front row, was an empty chair. There was a small white card on the seat.

Seren didn’t look at it once.

"Two hours," the chief judge called. "Begin!"

The hall went quiet, and nine furnaces roared.

Aren opened the crate, and he knew the salt was wrong before he touched it. It was the right color and the right weight, but he could see how it was made. River salt, ground fine and dusted with chalk.

He looked up. Two benches along, a Veil servant who had helped carry every house’s crate in from the street was busy wiping a clean table.

’Ours for certain. Probably others. A pill made with that would crack in the glass, and nobody would ever know why.’

He put the jar under the bench, reached into his shirt, and took a second jar of salt out of the Deep Purse. He had packed a second jar of everything. In his first life, he had never walked into a competition without expecting to be cheated.

Seren held out her hand for the salt without looking at him, and he put the good jar in it.

Then she began.

He had watched her for twelve days, and he still wasn’t ready for it. In the cellar she cursed and talked to herself. Here she didn’t make a sound. Her hands moved over the bench without a wasted motion: the lily he had ground cold at dawn tipped in like dust, the marrow boiled and skimmed and boiled again, the cores burned to ash, the salt in at the moment the mixture turned. She never hurried. Twice she stopped altogether and stood with her hands still, waiting for the crucible to be ready, while all around her the other pill houses rushed and sweated and swore.

People in the galleries began to notice. One by one, they stopped watching the first bench and started watching the hooded woman at the last.

The Veils finished first.

Tarquin held up his pill in silver tongs so the galleries could see it, pale gold and shining, and carried it to the glass himself. Sefa Lorne set it in the middle of the crystal. The number came up in the glass, large enough for the back of the hall to read.

Thirty.

The galleries broke into applause. Thirty was the cleanest Marrow ever read at a Port Myrrh Assay. Tarquin bowed to the judges and then, smiling, turned and bowed to the empty chair in the front row of the gallery, with its little white card.

Somebody laughed. Then several people did.

The other houses brought their pills to the glass one by one. Two of them cracked as soon as they touched the crystal, and their makers stood and stared at the pieces.

At the last bench, under the grey hood, Seren’s hands didn’t pause.

The mixture in her crucible had gone the color of honey. She spread her hands over it, and Aren, standing at her shoulder with the jars, saw her brace for it. The tightness, four years of the same blow, coming again in front of the whole city.

’Now.’

She pressed.

[Reduce to Zero: the Rot in Seren Veil’s press. Uses today: 1/2.]

[Cost: the Rot, in the Host. 1 second.]

For one second the black thread ran through his own ring again, and was gone. ’Four years of that, every press. She never once stopped.’

He felt her feel it. Her hands jerked, once, a hair’s width, as if the furnace had moved under them. Then the stillness went out of her shoulders, and the furnace flared clear gold, brighter than any other in the room, and a pill lay in the crucible no bigger than a thumbnail, so pale it was nearly white.

She lifted it out and walked it to the glass herself.

The whole hall watched her come down the floor in her grey hood, past all nine benches, past Tarquin, who was still smiling. She held the pill out to Sefa Lorne, and the auditor took it and set it in the middle of the crystal.

The number came up.

Twenty-four.

’Five better than in the cellar. Four days with her own notes, and she found five points in them.’

"Twenty-four percent," Sefa Lorne said, in her plain voice. She wrote it down. "That’s grade five."

"There’s no such thing as a grade five Marrow!" It was one of the judges, a fat man with a Veil ring. "Foundation pills stop at four. Everyone knows that."

"Now there’s one." Sefa Lorne didn’t look up from her ledger. "I watched it made, from the first fire. It’s in the glass."

Tarquin had stopped smiling.

"The Blue Mortar sells cough drops," he said. His voice was still pleasant, but it had gone high. "Its license is for cough drops. And the rules say a maker shows her face when her pill is read. Who is under that hood?"

The woman in the grey hood put up her hands and pushed it back.

The gallery saw her face, and the noise went from the front to the back. People were standing. People who had laughed at the empty chair a minute ago were saying her name to each other, over and over.

Seren Veil looked at her cousin across the glass.

"Marrow," she said. "It has always been mine."

Tarquin’s face had gone grey. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out of it, and the whole of Port Myrrh watched him stand there.

Aren didn’t see what happened next, because the window opened in front of his eyes.

[Investment recorded. Type: Hidden aid. Anchor unaware.]

[Anchor progressed: Seren Veil. Marrow Pill (Veil Gold): Impurities 29% → 24%. Grade 5.]

[Mirror Return triggered.]

The little wheel spun in the middle of the roaring hall. It went past x10, past x100, and slowed, and slowed, and the pointer crawled over the edge of the narrow band of x1,000 and stopped there.

[Result: x1,000.]

[Return 1/2: the Anchor’s progress, x1,000.]

[Alchemy (Grade C → A).]

It went into his hands like heat into iron. All at once he could see how every pill in her notebook worked, and why, and how each one could be made better.

[Return 2/2: the limit the Anchor broke, x100.]

[Rank C: Core Condensation → Core Formed.]

That one went into his chest.

The ring behind his breastbone, which had been turning around nothing since the night on the ship, drew tight. It closed. He felt it seal itself into one clean, hard circle with nothing inside it, and the cold of it went out through his whole body at once, down his arms into his fingers and down his legs into the floor. He put both hands flat on the bench and held on, and kept his face perfectly blank, and did not make a sound.

[Strength: 1,520 → 2,140. Agility: 1,310 → 1,880. Endurance: 1,760 → 2,450.]

[Core ability unlocked: Absent (Lv. 1).]

[For three seconds, nothing in the world can touch the Host, and the Host can touch nothing. Once per day.]

’A clean ring and six hundred strength, for one jar of salt. Best trade I’ve made in two lives.’

He breathed out.

When he looked up, the hall was still roaring, and Seren was walking back from the glass. Tarquin had disappeared into a knot of Veil men. The judges were arguing.

And by the glass, Sefa Lorne had stopped writing and was looking at his shoulder.

He glanced down. The bronze band there had gone white with frost, and as he watched, the frost began to melt.

The auditor wrote another line.

Seren reached the bench. She didn’t look at the crowd or at the galleries or at the empty chair with its card. She looked at Aren, close enough that he could see the furnace light in her eyes, and her voice was low.

"Something touched my furnace," she said. "During the press. Twice now."

"I didn’t touch anything."

"You were standing next to it." Her eyes didn’t move from his face. "If you ever touch my furnace again, goose, I’ll cut your hands off."

"They’re cheaper than yours."

[Seren Veil. Hostility: 91% → 93%.]

She turned away from him and picked up her hood, and tried to fold it.

Her hands, which never shook, were shaking.