Chapter 5 Level One

Breakfast at Widow Ostry's was at the seventh bell, and she meant it.

I came down at the sixth and a half, washed and with my hair combed and no hay in it, and sat at the long table in the back room with nine other lodgers. Nobody talked. Widow Ostry put out porridge, bread, a pot of dripping and a jug of weak tea, and stood at the end of the table with her hands folded until we'd all started, like a sergeant watching recruits eat.

The porridge was good. Thick, with salt, the way it should be. I had two bowls and she watched me have the second one and didn't say anything, which I took for approval.

The other lodgers were a mixed lot. Two clerks in black coats who ate fast and left. A big quiet man with a bandaged hand. An old lady with a hearing horn. And down at the far end, sitting by herself with a book propped against the teapot, a young woman in a plain grey robe.

She read the whole time. She turned the pages with one hand and ate porridge with the other, and never once looked up. Her fingers were stained with ink, the first two on her right hand nearly black with it, and there was a smudge on her cheek where she'd pushed her hair back. Her book was thick and full of columns of tiny numbers. I couldn't imagine wanting to read that over porridge, but she looked like she was enjoying it more than I'd ever enjoyed anything.

She left before the bell had finished ringing, still reading as she went out the door.

"Don't stare," said Widow Ostry. "It's common."

"Sorry," I said, and finished my tea.

* * *

The queue at the Guild started on the steps and went in through the big doors and halfway across the hall inside. I joined the end of it at a quarter to eight and stood there.

It was a hell of a hall. The dome I'd seen from outside was even bigger from under it, with light coming in through round windows near the top and falling in long bars across the floor. There were long tables down both sides with people at them eating and drinking and arguing, and a gallery running round the walls with more people leaning on the rail. At the far end, past the queue, was a long counter with clerks behind it. Beside the counter stood a tall pillar of glass so dark green it was nearly black.

"First time?"

The bloke behind me in the queue was about thirty, tall and thin, with a thin moustache he'd clearly spent time on. He wore a good leather jerkin with an iron disc on a chain round his neck.

"It is," I said.

"I can tell." He looked me up and down and seemed to enjoy what he saw. "Lark Hollis. Iron rank. Level fifty-eight." He tapped the disc. "I'm here to renew my licence. You're here to register, I take it. From where?"

"Thornfell."

"Never heard of it."

"Most people haven't."

"Farmer?"

"That's right."

"Lovely." He smiled under the moustache. "And what does a farmer from Thornfell want with the Guild?"

"Work," I said. "I've got a tax to pay."

Lark laughed out loud. A couple of people turned round.

"You'll want to know about the stone, then," he said. He nodded at the green pillar. "That's the Ledger Stone. You put your hand on it, it reads your Tally and shows it to the clerk. Your name, your level, your class, your skills. Can't lie to it, can't hide from it. It decides your rank and your rank decides what jobs you get and what they pay." He looked at me with his head on one side. "Most farmers come in at about four. Five, if they've done a bit of hunting. Don't be upset if it's low. It's not a reflection on you as a person."

"Thanks," I said.

"Just a reflection on you as everything else."

He laughed at that too. I let him. It was a long queue.

* * *

It took an hour to get to the front. The clerk at the registration desk was a young man with spectacles and a cold, who took my name and my village and my age and wrote them in a big book, and then held out his hand.

"Registration fee. One gold."

I'd known that was coming, more or less, but it still hurt. I put a gold crown in his hand and he dropped it in a box without looking at it.

"Weapons are tagged," he said, and sniffed. "Next desk."

The weapon clerk was an older man with a bald head and a box of brass tags on strings. I unslung the cleaver, unwrapped the sacking and laid it on his counter.

He looked at it.

"Cleaver," he said, writing. "Butcher's. One." He stamped a brass tag with the words and held it up. "Hand it here and I'll tag it."

"It's there," I said.

"I mean pass it to me, son. I need to put the tag through the hole."

I slid it across the counter towards him. He reached out to pick it up by the handle.

It didn't come.

He frowned and tried again with both hands. His face went pink. He braced one foot against the bottom of the counter and heaved, and the cleaver lay there on the wood and didn't move at all.

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"Is this a joke?" he said.

"No."

Behind me, Lark had seen it. He came forward with a grin and leaned on the counter beside me.

"Out of the way, Tolly, let a professional," he said, and took hold of the handle in one hand and lifted.

The grin stayed on for a bit after the rest of his face had given up. He changed hands. He used both hands. He put his back into it, and his legs.

"Fuck me," he said through his teeth. "Fucking thing. Come on, you bastard."

The counter creaked. The cleaver didn't.

"Is it nailed down?" Lark said at last, breathing hard.

"No," I said.

"It's got to be nailed down."

I reached past him, picked it up, held out my other hand for the tag, and threaded the string through the hole in the handle and tied it off myself. CLEAVER, BUTCHER'S, ONE. I put it on the counter again.

"It's heavy," I said. "You get used to it."

The weapon clerk looked at it, and at me, and wrote something in his book and underlined it twice. Lark was rubbing his wrist and staring at the cleaver like it had said something about his mother.

"Stone," the clerk said, and jerked his head.

* * *

The Ledger Stone was taller than me and as wide as a barrel, and close up you could see things moving inside it, faint lines of light that drifted and curled like weed in a river. A woman in a grey Guild coat stood beside it with a slate. People in the queue behind had shuffled round so they could see. The drinkers along the walls had stopped eating to watch. I suppose a new face at the stone is the best show in the hall most mornings.

"Hand flat on the glass," said the woman. "Hold still. Don't take it off until I say."

I put my hand on it. It was cold, like putting your hand in creek water, and the cold went up to my elbow.

The lights in the stone turned and drifted towards my hand. They gathered there, thick and bright. Then words came up in the glass above my fingers, green and glowing, and the woman with the slate leaned in and read them out.

Name: Tobin Marsh

Level: 1

Class: Farmhand

Skills: [Butchery] (Rank ???) [Fence Mending] (Rank ???) [Early Riser] (Rank ???) [Pest Control] (Rank ???)

"Level one," she said.

The hall went very quiet for about the length of a breath.

Then it laughed.

It wasn't a small laugh. It started at the long tables and spread up into the gallery and back down, and people were slapping each other and pointing, and somebody up on the rail shouted, "Level one! He's a baby!" and that set them off again. Lark had his hand over his face and his shoulders were shaking.

I didn't mind. I was looking at the stone.

Below the skills, there was more writing. It wasn't words. It was little marks, crowded together, that wriggled like ants on a hot stone. When I looked straight at them they slid away to the side. I moved a finger towards them, still keeping my palm on the glass, and they slid away from my finger too, like water away from oil.

"What's that?" I said.

The slate woman frowned at it. "Interference. It happens sometimes when the stone's due for cleaning. Ignore it." She made a mark on her slate. "Farmhand. Level one. All right, take your hand off."

I took my hand off.

There was a crack in the glass where my hand had been.

It was very fine, a hairline, about as long as my finger, running across the place where my palm had rested. You'd only see it if you were looking. The slate woman was looking. She stared at it, and her mouth went tight.

"That was there before," I said. Then, because I wasn't sure, "Was that there before?"

She didn't answer.

It was an old stone, though, you could see that. The base was worn and the brass fittings had gone green. Old gear gets tired. Dad had a set of scales in the barn that read a pound light for the last ten years of his life, and he never got round to fixing it. Expensive city thing like that, it'd want looking after, and nobody looks after anything properly when it belongs to everybody.

The laughter was dying down. Then a door opened at the back of the hall, and it stopped altogether.

* * *

The man who came out was about fifty and wore a long red velvet coat and a heavy gold chain across his chest. He had a neat grey beard and a smile that didn't make it anywhere near his eyes. The people at the long tables sat up straighter when he walked past. The clerks behind the counter suddenly had important things to write.

"Guildmaster Ashby," Lark whispered next to me, with his face straight again.

Ashby came up to the stone and looked at the words still glowing in it. He looked at the crack. He looked at the slate woman, who handed him her slate without being asked. Then he looked at me.

"Level one," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

"Twenty-six." He said it slowly, like he was tasting it. "Do you know, Mister Marsh, in the thirty years I've been at this Guild, I have never once enrolled a Level One past the age of twelve. Never. Even the dullest child in the dullest village gets to two by mucking out the pigs." He smiled at the hall, and the hall laughed for him, dutifully. "You are a record. Congratulations."

"Thank you," I said.

He hadn't been expecting that. It took the smile a moment to come back.

"The Guild takes all comers," he said. "That is our charter. So." He snapped his fingers and the spectacled clerk ran up with a copper disc on a chain. Ashby dropped it in my hand. "Copper rank. The lowest we have. As for work, let me see."

The clerk produced a sheet of paper. Ashby looked down it with his lip pushed out, then tapped one line.

"Here we are. Old Sewer Junction Four, in the Lower Weir. Reports of noises and missing dogs. The sewer men won't go down there. Almost certainly rats." He smiled again. "Six silver on completion. I'd say that's about your level, wouldn't you?"

The hall waited.

Six silver. It wasn't much, but it was more than the farm made in a month. It was a start.

And rats.

"I can do rats," I said.

There was a pause. Then the whole hall lost it. Lark was bent double. Somebody up in the gallery was hammering the rail with his fist. Even the spectacled clerk was snorting into his handkerchief. Ashby smiled at all of it and handed me the job sheet and went back through his door without another word.

The job sheet had a little drawing of the junction on it, a circle with four lines coming off, and at the bottom somebody had written in a different hand: Bring a lamp. Two lamps. That's good advice for most things.

I put the Copper disc on its chain round my neck. It was light and cool and it clinked against my shirt buttons.

* * *

I walked out of the Guild hall into the sunshine with the job sheet in my hand and the hall still laughing behind me, and I stood on the top step and breathed in the stink of the city.

Level one.

You'd think it'd sting. All those people laughing. But it was the strangest thing, standing there. It felt like setting down a heavy sack I'd been carrying so long I'd stopped noticing it.

The bandit, the bolts, the horse, the stone. Every one of them had sat at the back of my head this past week, small, like a stone in a boot. Each one had a good explanation, and I believed the explanations, mostly. But they'd sat there all the same.

Now the Guild's own stone had looked right into me and said it plain. Level one. Farmhand. Nothing special.

Dad was right. He was always right about that sort of thing.

Lark came out a minute later, rubbing his wrist. He stopped beside me on the step and didn't look at me.

"Junction Four," he said.

"That's the one."

"They sent two Copper lads down there last month. Both of them came up running and one of them won't go below ground now, not even into a cellar." He sniffed. "Rats, my arse. Ashby gives that job to people he wants gone."

"It's six silver."

"It's a sewer, farmer. Under the Weir. Nobody sensible goes down Four." He finally looked at me, then at the cleaver, then away again. "Heavy, you said."

"It is heavy."

"Heavy is a sack of grain," Lark said. "That was a building." And he went off down the steps without saying goodbye.

I counted my money on the step. Twenty-one gold, less the one for the registration. About twenty, then. A hundred and eighty to go.

That was a lot of rats. But I'd killed a lot of rats.

I asked a man selling hot chestnuts the way to the Lower Weir. He pointed down the hill, towards the river, where the smoke hung thickest.

I could do rats.

I tucked the job sheet inside Hal's coat, hitched the cleaver higher on my back, and went.