Chapter 29: Repairs

Money had a memory, but it certainly didn’t talk to strangers, and Aren spent two whole days learning that the hard way.

He went back to Gilded Row and doggedly tried the other money-changers. Seven of them wouldn’t speak to a commoner at all, two took his silver and told him nothing, and the last, a fat woman with rings on every finger, laughed openly in his face and asked whether he wanted to sell the Valdris coin, since he obviously couldn’t afford to keep it.

On the third day he went to the cathedral itself and stood in the great square under the white towers, watching the treasury clerks come and go through a small side door in their white robes with gold trim. He watched patiently for six hours. They all looked the same, none of them carried a bag of old gold, and none of them looked remotely like a man who would pay a cult to drown a city.

’Six hours of staring at clerks! In my old life I billed people for less.’

On the walk home he passed the north side of the cathedral, where the Rift had opened on the Night of Bells, and the damage was far worse than he had expected. A whole corner of the building had cracked open, and the great stained-glass window above it was just a ragged hole of black lead and sky. Scaffolding covered the wall from the ground to the roof, and dozens of stonemasons were already busily at work on it, swinging hammers and shouting to each other and hauling blocks of pale stone up on ropes.

Aren stopped walking and looked at it properly for the first time.

It was very good scaffolding, tall and strong and carefully tied, and there was a lot of it. The stones going up the ropes were already cut and shaped to fit, and more of them waited in wagons along the side of the square with the mark of the Stonecutters’ Guild painted on their sides. The Night of Bells had been nineteen days ago. In his old life he had seen builders take two months just to draw up the plans for a job like this, and the Church of the Light had started rebuilding in under three weeks, with stone that was already cut.

Elric the stone cutter had a yard on the edge of the lower city by the quarry road, full of white dust and the sound of chisels. He was a big, slow man with forearms like hams, and he remembered Aren very well, because before the Awakening Aren had bought a sack of his cheap quartz chips for three silver and Elric had been asking ever since if he wanted more.

"The cathedral job?" Elric wiped his hands on his apron and laughed heartily. "Every cutter in the city wanted it. Biggest contract in ten years. The Guild took it, of course. The Guild always takes the big ones."

"When?"

He thought about it slowly. "Two months ago now, maybe a bit less. The Church said the north wall was old and the window was cracked, and they wanted the whole corner rebuilt before the Founders’ Festival. Very particular about it. Sent the measurements and everything."

Aren kept his face blank. "Two months ago."

"About that. Why?"

"The corner they ordered the stone for." Aren said it slowly. "Is it the same corner the Rift broke open?"

Elric opened his mouth and then slowly shut it again. He gave Aren a strange look, and then turned toward the white towers of the cathedral, just visible over the rooftops of the lower city.

"Now that you mention it, it is." His voice had gone very quiet.

That night Aren lay on his mattress in the dark and laid it all out carefully in order.

Two months before the Night of Bells, someone in the Church had looked at the north wall of the cathedral and ordered the exact stones they would need to rebuild it. A few days before the Night, someone in the white and gold of the treasury had walked into a money-changer’s on Gilded Row with a bag of Valdris gold. And weeks after it, someone paid in that same gold had walked into Rook’s warehouse and bet five hundred crowns that Vivienne Ashgrave wouldn’t finish the Founders’ Festival. The Church needed its cathedral repaired before the Festival, and was very particular about it.

’Why would anyone care that much about a window, unless something important is going to happen in front of it?’

He thought about the map on the library wall, the seven Rifts in a ring with the Academy in the middle, and the cathedral sitting right there in the ring as the biggest Rift of all, the only one rated D. It wasn’t a target, he realized. It was cover. If you were going to open seven Rifts around a city and one of them was in your own house, nobody would ever suspect you, because you would be the victim. You would get sympathy and donations, and the King’s knights would come and protect you first.

A clever man might start a fire next to his own house, so nobody thinks he lit it. Rook had said that casually in the warehouse, and Aren had taken it for one of Rook’s clever lines. He was starting to think Rook had been right about a lot of things.

The pairings for the exhibition duels went up on the great doors the next morning, and the whole Academy crowded into the courtyard to read them. Aren waited patiently at the back for nearly an hour before he could get close, and found his own name near the bottom of the Class D list.

Servant (Class D) against Aldous Penrose (Class B).

A few people nearby laughed. Aldous Penrose was the weak-chinned second-year who had sworn at Aren’s trial that he saw him near the vault. He had a C-grade class called Ironward that made his skin as hard as a shield, and while he was no great fighter, he was a lot better than a Servant with a combat aptitude of zero.

But Aren knew something else about him, because he had spent a week watching the training yards. Aldous Penrose was terrified of fire and flinched every time a Flame student raised a hand anywhere near him. It was already in Rook’s book, and the odds on Penrose were very short.

’Short odds on the favorite, and I’m the only one who knows he’s scared of matches. This is going to be fun!’

He looked at the pairing and didn’t laugh at all.

Farther up, alone in the first row, was the final duel of the Festival, to be fought on the last evening in the great arena below the Academy hill in front of the whole city.

Vivienne Ashgrave (Class S) against the champion of the upper years.

And under everything, at the very bottom of the notice, someone had added a line in a different hand, in gold ink.

By the grace of the Church of the Light, the Festival will be opened and blessed by His Eminence, Archdeacon Morvane of the High Cathedral, who will stand beside the Measure in the Great Hall on the first day.

Aren went back to the cathedral that afternoon, and this time he didn’t bother with the treasury door. He walked in through the main doors with the old women and the merchants’ wives who came to light candles, and stood quietly at the back of the nave in the cool colored light of the windows that were still whole, and watched.

Near the altar, an old priest in white and gold was talking to a small crowd of nobles. He had a kind, tired face and a voice like warm honey, and around him stood his clerks and deacons in a half circle, the way clerks always stand around important men.

One of them was holding the alms box. He was younger than the others, thirty perhaps, in the white and gold of the cathedral treasury, and he held the heavy silver box carefully against his chest, as if it mattered a great deal. He had a very calm face, the kind you forget the moment you look away.

His eyes were grey.

Aren deliberately didn’t move toward the altar. He stayed in the shadows by the door and watched, just as he had watched a hundred men across a hundred tables, waiting for them to show him what they were.

The young clerk lifted his head. His grey eyes drifted slowly across the nave, across the old women with their candles and the merchants’ wives, and across a boy in a shabby coat standing in the shadows by the door.

They stopped on Aren, and stayed there, and then very slightly, the calm face smiled.