34 | The Man Who Stopped

Brannick Sallow had been 1st Stage Adept for nine years and four months, and some days he did not count anymore.

He had started at 11, sweeping a sect outrider's yard in exchange for a copied method on bad paper.

It had taken him until 25 to break his first wall to become an awakened, a cultivator by popular term.

Fourteen years of feeding refined mana into a body that threw it back out again, and two of the boys who started with him had died trying and one had gone simple.

That was the wall everybody talked about.

Once it was through, it was through. He had gone from 1st to 10th Stage Apprentice in the nine years after and never once found it hard.

Then he had hit the tier wall at 34 and learned what the world actually charged.

Mana-dense ground, which belonged to the Ascendancy. A Refined grade method, which belonged to the Guild and the Arcanum.

It was not sold to men like him at any price. Or Ozhan pills, which were priced by people who knew exactly what a man in his position would pay.

He had bought his way into Adept at 36 with a bottle of Consortium pill-water that cost eleven months of everything he owned, and lain on a rented floor over a rope-maker's in Corran for six hours, and got up an Adept.

Nine years since. Every crown he could squeeze out of a river town of 4,000 people. Three quarters of the way to one course of the pills that would take him to 2nd Stage.

The price had gone up twice in that time.

That was the whole architecture of Brannick's life, and every single person in Greyfen thought he ran the town because he enjoyed it.

...

Brannick was lost in thought, his gaze rough as he thought of all his recent losses in manpower.

He had four men dead in five weeks and he worked it the way he worked everything, slowly, on paper, in the back room of the tannery.

Marrek. 3rd Stage. Towpath, from behind, one blow.

Dell and Ounce. Both 5th. Together, on the road, and that had been a fight, because there was blood on the stones from two directions.

Corrin Bly. 8th Stage. Waiting, armed, positioned, and the only reason Brannick knew he was dead was that Bly had never in six years failed to be somewhere he said he would be.

He tapped the page, his large calloused fingers threatening to pierce through with that single action..

Wrong shape.

An Ordwyn deserter gone feral robs people.

That was what the fish stalls had built and it was a good story and it was wrong, because in five weeks not one bag had gone missing.

Marrek's had been on the towpath with the money still in it.

Some coin gone from each. Not much. A handful. The sort of amount a man takes when he does not want to walk home jingling.

So he needs money but money isn't his main goal. He is careful carrying it and he does not want the rest.

That was not a robber. That was somebody on a wage from somewhere else he reasoned. Someone either being paid or on a payroll to this this.

Second wrong thing. Whoever it was knew the routes exactly.

Marrek had gone at the one bend where the reeds came within six feet of the path. Dell and Ounce had gone on the only stretch where a man could see 200 yards both ways.

Not an outsider. Somebody told, or somebody who had watched for weeks.

He wrote out everyone who knew the Friday schedule. Eleven names. Four dead.

One of them a thin, nervous weighman at Vail's yard with a nine year old daughter, who had been, Brannick now recalled, unaccountably calm the week Ost went missing.

He circled Petrin.

Then the third thing, which he did not like.

Vail had paid him 115 crowns short. Which was exactly a quarter of 461, which was the figure a Callowmere had put in a letter about false weights.

And in the same month a Callowmere slave had broken Herrick's leg in the tannery alley.

And in the same month Lady Vesper Callowmere had opened correspondence with two Bind Guild offices about something nobody could find out.

...

"The boy in the alley," he said, when Herrick came in on the crutch. "Again."

"Told you, boss. Callowmere's. Skinny. Pretty."

"Rank."

"Nothing. Unranked, clear as day. I looked." Herrick shifted off the crutch.

"That's what I can't get past. I looked at him, Brannick. There was nothing. And then he put a hand on my leg and my leg came apart."

Brannick nodded and went to the window.

Here is what he believed by the end of that morning, and he was wrong about exactly one part of it.

That somebody had put a trained man into the Callowmere household. That the girl either did not know or had done it herself, and given how completely her family had written her off, he thought it was the second.

That a woman with no house behind her had hired a knife, dressed it in grey linen, and pointed it at Greyfen, because a slave cannot be prosecuted, cannot testify, and cannot be traced to anyone except their master.

And that the Guild letters were not a threat.

They were a shield, and a good one, because he could not touch the boy in daylight without inviting a Guild reader into a town with forty unstamped names in it.

He had to admire it slightly. He did not enjoy it.

"She's a lot cleverer than her brothers," he said to the window.

"Boss?"

"Three things. Write them, you can't hold three."

Herrick got out a stub of chalk.

"One. Petrin. Not the girl, I'm not an animal. Bring him in, sit him down, let him look at me for an hour. If he runs, we know."

"Right."

"Two. Fridays stop. Everything moves into the market square in daylight where there's 300 people, and I do not care that it looks weak, because looking weak is cheaper than four funerals." He counted it.

"Whoever this is has been eating us in the dark. So there is no more dark."

Herrick wrote.

"Three."

Brannick paused. He had been putting this one off for a week, because it cost 80 crowns and because saying it out loud in his own tannery meant admitting there was a thing in his town he could not handle.

Nine years at 1st Stage. Three quarters of the way to a course of pills.

80 crowns.

"Send to Corran. Consortium house on Wick Street. Tell them Brannick Sallow wants an account settled and can pay 80."

Herrick's chalk stopped.

"Boss. That's Kolm money."

"I know whose money it is, Herrick."

Brannick turned back to the window, where the yard was grey and the river was grey and the whole of Greyfen sat under a sky that had not opened in four days.

"Somebody put a knife in my town," he said.

His gaze swept across all the land his eye could see, his gaze moving slowly through the town he had made his own and had a subtly ruled.

"So I'm buying a bigger one."