Chapter 28: Old Bones

Rook gave him one of the coins.

It was heavier than a gold crown and slightly bigger, worn smooth at the edges by three hundred years of fingers. A tower with seven windows on one side, and on the other a crowned woman’s face so faded that only the line of her nose was left. Around the rim, in old letters Aren could barely make out: VARN. CITY OF WHITE WALLS.

"Keep it. I have four hundred and ninety-nine more." He turned a page. "Find out where they came from."

Aren rolled the coin between his fingers. In his old life he had always said that money had a memory. It passed from hand to hand and every hand left a mark, and if you were patient you could follow those marks all the way back to the first one.

"I’ll find out." And then he didn’t leave.

Rook didn’t look up, but he noticed immediately. "Something else, stone-seller?"

Aren had been chewing on this for three weeks, ever since the night in the Tanners’ yard when Street Fighter’s Instinct first opened his eyes and he had looked at Rook standing over Mother Hesk and seen something he hadn’t wanted to see. He had listened carefully to every word of Crane’s lessons on the higher ranks since then, and slowly the pieces had fitted together.

’A smart boy keeps his mouth shut. Rook kills people who know too much. On the other hand, an Anchor who never grows never pays out.’

"Your right side."

Rook’s hand stopped on the page.

"Under your arm. The third rib, maybe the fourth. It broke a long time ago and healed crooked." He kept his voice very even. "You hold that shoulder a little high to keep the weight off it, and when you fought Hesk, you turned left every chance you got. You never turned right. Not once."

The warehouse had gone silent, and the men at the long tables had stopped writing. Rook closed his book slowly and set it on the arm of his chair.

"Go on." It was so soft that every hair on Aren’s arms stood up.

"Professor Crane says the bones are tempered at Rank D, and at Rank C the power gathers into a core in the chest. But the core is built on top of the body, so if the body is wrong, the core is wrong." Aren swallowed. "I think your rib broke while you were still tempering your bones. It set crooked, and your body finished tempering it that way. Now your core leaks. Every time it tries to grow solid, some of the power runs out through that crooked bone like water through a cracked pot."

Rook said nothing.

"Rank C has four stages." Aren went on quietly. "I think you’ve been stuck at the first one for years, my lord. I think that’s why a man with a grade A class runs a gang on the docks instead of a house in the Upper Ring."

For a while Rook didn’t move at all. Then he stood and came down the platform steps one at a time and stopped in front of Aren, and the air turned heavy and cold. No feathers this time. It was worse than feathers, a weight that pressed on Aren’s shoulders and lungs and the back of his neck until his knees wanted to fold.

’So that’s a Rank C aura. Even a broken one.’

He stubbornly stayed on his feet.

"Eleven years ago, I was Rank D." Rook’s voice was perfectly calm. "Tempering my bones. The best young swordsman in my family. My cousin and I fought a duel over an inheritance, and he broke my ribs with the flat of his sword, and I killed him for it. My family threw me out the same night, and no healer would touch me after that." He looked down at Aren. "I set the bone myself, in a cellar, with my own hands. My body finished tempering a month later, and I broke through to Rank C a year after that." His dark eyes didn’t blink. "I haven’t moved since. Nobody has ever noticed. Not in eleven years. Not one person."

The weight on Aren’s shoulders grew heavier, and lifting his chin took everything he had.

"I know a man who can fix it."

The weight vanished.

Doran the butcher looked at Rook’s bare side under the lamp for a long minute without saying a word.

They were in the back room of his shop. Rook sat on the wooden table with his black coat folded beside him and his shirt off, thinner than he looked in the coat, all hard muscle and old white scars. Under his right arm, the skin over his ribs was lumpy and twisted, like a tree root grown around a stone.

"Who set this?"

"I did."

"You did a bad job." Doran pressed two thick fingers firmly against the lump, and although Rook didn’t flinch, a muscle jumped in his jaw. "And then you tempered it. Ah." The old butcher straightened. "That’s a problem. A tempered bone is harder than iron. I can’t break it with a rod."

"So you can’t fix it."

"Didn’t say that. I said I can’t break it. You can." Doran wiped his hands on his apron. "Put your own power into it, all at once, like you’d hit an enemy. Your power made it hard, so your power can crack it. Then I set it, fast, before your body starts healing it wrong again, and you hold still while it knits. That’s the part that’ll hurt."

Rook looked at Aren by the door, a long look with nothing friendly in it.

"If this is a trick, stone-seller, you won’t leave this room."

"It’s not a trick."

"Then why?" Rook’s voice was dangerously quiet. "You get fifteen percent of my book whether I’m crooked or straight. Why do this?"

Aren had an answer ready, about how a stronger Rook was better for business and no gang would ever dare touch the east bank again. All of it was true, and none of it was the reason.

"Because you’ve been stuck for eleven years." "And I know what that feels like."

Rook stared at him. Then he lay back on the table and closed his eyes.

"Tell me when."

When Doran nodded, Rook laid his own hand flat against his right side and pushed.

It wasn’t a snap. It was a deep, grinding crack like stone splitting in winter, and the little room exploded into black feathers, hundreds of them, whirling down like a storm of ash. Rook arched off the table with every muscle locked and his face gone white, and he didn’t make a single sound.

Doran was already moving. His big red hands found the broken pieces and pulled and pressed and turned, quick and sure, the hands of a man who had done this on battlefields with arrows flying over his head. Something slid into place under the twisted skin, and Doran bound it tight with long strips of linen and a thick layer of grey paste.

"Now breathe. Deep as you can, both sides. And don’t move."

Rook breathed, and Aren didn’t need any skill to see what happened next. Rook drew in a breath deeper than any he had taken in eleven years, all the way down into the right side of his chest, and something stirred behind his breastbone. A dark shimmer, like black water under ice, that had been turning in slow, broken circles for years and leaking away at one edge. Now the edge was sealed. The black water turned and turned and drew in on itself, tighter and tighter, until it wasn’t water anymore but something dense and dark and shining, a pearl made of night.

Rook’s eyes flew open.

[Anchor progressed.][Rook. Rank C: Core Condensation → Core Formed.][Source: Investment recorded.][Mirror Return triggered.]

The small wheel spun past x10 without slowing, then crawled, and the pointer slid onto the wide band of x100 and stopped there.

[Result: x100.][Return: Core formation progress x100.][Host has not reached Rank D. Return converted to lesser experience.]

It hit him like a wave. Heat surged up from the soles of his feet, so hard and fast he had to grab the doorframe, and it kept coming, again and again, filling him like water poured into an empty jar.

[Rank E: Level 3 → Level 4.][Rank E: Level 4 → Level 5.][Rank E: Level 5 → Level 6.][Rank E: Level 6 → Level 7.]

Four levels in ten seconds, standing in the back of a butcher’s shop with feathers in his hair. He had climbed down cliffs and dropped rocks on monsters for every single level so far, and a broken rib and a man who could finally breathe had given him more than all of those nights put together.

’So that’s what the System really is. Not the monsters or the cores. People!’

Rook was looking at him from the table, breathing deep on both sides for the first time in eleven years. His face was pale and calm, and there was something in his dark eyes that Aren had never seen there before.

[Rook. Hostility: 94% → 87%.]

Seven percent down. The old instinct in Aren twitched unhappily, the one that hated watching a number drop, and he told it to be quiet.

The next morning he took the Valdris coin to Gilded Row, the money-changers’ street in the Upper Ring. There were eleven changers, and most of them wouldn’t talk to a commoner. The third one, an old man called Fisk with spectacles as thick as bottle glass, studied the coin through a little lens.

"Valdris gold. Very old, very pure. You don’t see these much." He set it down. "But you’re the second person to bring me one this month."

"Who was the first?"

Fisk hesitated, so Aren laid a silver on the counter, and Fisk looked at it and quickly put it in his pocket.

"A clerk." He lowered his voice. "Came to change a whole bag of them, three weeks ago, before the Night of Bells. Said he was paying suppliers." He leaned in. "He wore the white and gold, boy. From the cathedral treasury."