Chapter 22: Who Gets Richer

The Chronicles room was on the fourth floor of the library, behind a locked iron gate, and Aren had the key.

Unofficially. The key belonged to the head librarian, a nervous old man who hated stairs, but Crane had been sending his Servant up and down the library with ledgers for three weeks, and the librarian had started cheerfully handing over the whole ring just to save his knees. Nobody had ever asked for it back.

The room was small and dusty and smelled of old leather. Its shelves held the handwritten histories of Eldrath, too old and too fragile to leave, and students needed a teacher’s permission to read them. Aren had no permission whatsoever. He had an armful of ledgers in case anyone came up the stairs, and about two hours before Crane started wondering where he was.

The book he wanted was on the third shelf, thick and heavy and bound in faded red leather: The Chronicle of the Red Century. When he pulled it out, a small card slipped from between its pages and landed softly at his feet.

It was a borrowing card, names and dates in the librarian’s shaky hand, most of them decades old. The last line was from eight days ago, one week before the Night of Bells.

Borrowed by: G. Crane.

’Huh. That’s not suspicious at all.’

He slid the card back exactly where it had been and opened the book carefully.

Valdris had been a great kingdom, and the writer of the Chronicle had clearly loved it, because he said so on nearly every page. Seven cities and a capital called Varn, with white walls and golden roofs. An Academy older than Highcrest’s. More S-rank Awakened than any kingdom on the continent.

And then, over ten years, it had started to die, and the writer hadn’t understood it while it was happening. You could see it in how the entries changed. At first the Rifts were just notes in the margin, three this month in the eastern provinces, unusual. A few pages later it was five a month and the King had sent knights, and after that whole pages turned into lists of cities and dates, the handwriting getting faster and messier, as if the writer had been running out of time.

Near the end there was a map of Varn in brown ink. Seven small marks circled the city in a perfect ring, like wounds, and under the drawing the writer had added a single line.

On the night of the Seven Wounds, the Hollow Choir sang, and the deep answered.

Aren went back over the next few pages very slowly. The Hollow Choir had been monks, or something like monks, who wore grey and lived in the mountains of Valdris, and nobody had ever taken them seriously. They believed the Abyss wasn’t a wound but a door, that the world on this side was sick and needed washing clean, and that a Great Tide would be the cure. When the Tide came and Valdris drowned, the Choir vanished with it, and most historians later decided it had never really existed.

He closed the book and walked over to the big teaching map of Highcrest by the window. He didn’t need a pen, because he knew exactly where the seven Rifts had opened: the docks, the east bank by the tanneries, the merchant quarter, the cathedral, the old gardens in the Upper Ring, the north wall and the river gate. He traced them in the air one after another.

They made a ring. Not a perfect one, but close enough, and right in the middle of it, on the hill above the city, sat the Academy.

’Of course it’s us. It’s always the school.’

Old Mag didn’t even let him finish. He had copied one line of runes from the stake onto a scrap of paper and laid it on her counter, and her face went the color of old candle wax. She picked it up with two fingers, held it over her lamp, and watched it burn to ash.

"Don’t ever bring that into my shop again." Her voice was very quiet.

"Mag..."

"I mean it, child. Thirty years I’ve sold things nobody else would touch. Monster bones, cursed blades, once a hand that still moved. I don’t scare easy." She brushed the ash off the counter with the side of her hand. "Two months ago, a man came down to the docks selling iron nails with marks like those. A fence I knew bought three. A week later the fence was gone, his shop empty, his bed still warm." Her one eye fixed on him. "I don’t know who makes those things. I don’t want to know. And I don’t want you knowing either."

"Then who would know?"

She picked up her pipe and looked deliberately away.

"Somebody who isn’t afraid of the Abyss." "And there’s only one of those in this city that I know of."

She didn’t name the street. She didn’t need to.

Rook was reading when Aren came into the warehouse, as always, and he didn’t look up through the seven Rifts, the ring, or the Hollow Choir. He didn’t look up when Aren said the word cult either. He just turned a page lazily.

"So." He waited until Aren was done. "Some madmen in grey robes want to drown the world. That’s a very interesting story, stone-seller, and completely useless."

"Why?"

"Because madmen need money." Rook finally raised his calm, dark eyes. "Iron nails don’t forge themselves. Ritual knives aren’t free. Somebody paid for seven men to walk into seven parts of my city in one night without being seen, and fed them, and hid them, and bribed the guards who didn’t see them." He closed his book. "You don’t find a snake by asking what it believes. You find it by asking who feeds it. So, who got richer this week?"

Aren had been thinking about nothing else since he pulled the stake out of the floor, and he went methodically through his list.

"The Hunters’ Guild. They took every contract in the city, clearing Rifts, hauling rubble, guarding streets. The cores crashed, but contracts don’t."

"Go on."

"The Church. Every funeral goes through them, every prayer for the dead costs money, and yesterday the donation lines went all the way around the square." He hesitated. "But the cathedral Rift was the biggest one. It hit their own building."

"A clever man might start a fire next to his own house," Rook said, "so nobody thinks he lit it. Go on."

"The Iron Empire. They didn’t get richer, but Aldermere got weaker. Forty-three dead, the King’s knights exhausted, the whole city scared. If they wanted a war, this would be a very good week to start one."

"And?"

"The Crown." Aren was less sure now. "There’s already talk of an emergency tax for the defense of the city."

Rook smiled for the first time, thinly, without it reaching his eyes. "You’ve missed one, stone-seller. The most important one."

Aren waited.

"Who owns the fish market?"

Aren opened his mouth and shut it again.

"Nobody, as of this morning." "Half the stalls are ash. The families who rented them can’t afford to rebuild, so the landlords are selling the plots cheap, because nobody wants to build where a Rift opened. In a month, someone will own that whole square for the price of a carriage." He leaned back in his tall chair. "Watch who buys it. Watch who buys the burned houses on the east bank, and the warehouses by the river gate. A Rift is a disaster for the people who live there and a gift for the people who were already waiting with money in their hands."

Aren didn’t move, because he had done exactly this in his old life. Not with Rifts, but with floods and factory fires and once with a small war in a country he’d never even visited. He’d bought the ruins from the people who had lost everything and sold them back at three times the price once they were rebuilt, and he had been extremely good at it, and not once had he thought about the people on the other side of those sales.

[Rook. Hostility: 88% → 89%.]

"You look ill." Rook was watching him with obvious interest. "Did you think you were the only one in this city who knew how to read a market?" He opened his book again. "Find out who’s buying, and you’ll find your snake."

He didn’t go straight home that night. He walked the streets around the fish market, where the smoke still hung in the air, and turned it over.

He had suspects now, and every one of them made sense: the Guild, the Church, the Empire, the Crown, and whoever was quietly buying up the ruins. Maybe one of them, maybe two working together, maybe none and the Choir paid for itself somehow. In a month or two of watching land sales and listening in corridors, he might start to understand.

What he didn’t understand was the thing in his mattress. He didn’t know what it did, or what would happen when the people who made it came looking for the one that was missing, and he had seen Mag’s face when she looked at those runes. You didn’t hold onto something you didn’t understand. You either learned what it was, fast, or you got rid of it.

And there was only one person in Highcrest who wasn’t afraid of the Abyss.

Lantern Street was narrow and very quiet, and most of its houses had been empty for years. Halfway down stood a tall, dark building with boarded windows, the kind of place children dared each other to touch on the way home. Mag said it had been empty for twenty years.

Tonight there was light under its door.

Aren stood in the street and looked at that thin yellow line. He thought about the fence who had vanished with his bed still warm, about twelve crowns a month, and about Nell drinking grey salt that tasted like a cold coin.

’This is a terrible idea. I should really go home!’

He took the roll of grey bandages out of his coat and wound it around his head until only his eyes were left, and then he walked up to the door.

Before he could knock, a small bell rang somewhere inside, and a voice spoke through the wood, soft and polite and very far away.

"Please. Come in."