Chapter 71: The God of the Bargain

It turned out that the young man with the nice shoes had a name, and it was Pell. When Justiciar Hale got him seated at the kitchen table that night, he talked as if he couldn’t stop. Maybe it was because Bors was standing right behind him with his arms crossed, or maybe it was because Pell had been in the market square when the bread wagons rolled in, and he had eaten three whole loaves by himself.

"I didn’t know Lord Draven until yesterday," Pell said, looking down at his shoes. "There was a guy at the docks asking for people to come work for him. Paid good. So five of us followed him to a building in the merchant district near the water. It’s called the old Gilded Exchange, and it used to be a bank before the King built his new one. They gave us the coats and the shoes, and they handed each of us a bag."

"Who filled the bags?" Kai asked.

Pell gulped and stared even harder at his shoes.

"There’s a basement," Pell said. "It’s full of rocks from the river, mounds of them, like a rock pit. There’s a guy sitting at a table down there who fills the bags by hand, and when the rocks leave his hand, they turn into gold." Pell shivered so hard that his chair creaked underneath him. "He doesn’t blink. I watched him the whole time, and he didn’t blink once. And his eyes are the same color as the coins."

Elowen was sitting in the corner of the kitchen with her sword across her lap, and Kai glanced over at her. The blade hadn’t changed at all while Pell was speaking.

"He is telling the truth," Elowen said.

"There’s something else," Pell said, and he finally looked up at Kai. "Every time he finished filling a bag, he said the same thing. He said, thank you for your prayer."

The kitchen went quiet for a long moment.

Kai looked down at the table and thought about the market square, and about all of those people down on their knees. He thought about Syraphim telling him that every bought prayer tasted like metal, and then he remembered what she had said to him on the edge of the auction stage, and the hair on his arms stood on end.

[Those prayers did not come to us, Kai. But they had to go somewhere]

"They went to him," Kai whispered.

Celestine was sitting in a chair near the fire, drinking a cup of the young priest’s willow-bark tea, and when she set the cup down, her hands were shaking.

"The Radiant Church sold blessings in the name of the Mother for forty years," Celestine said. "We sold thousands of them every year. Every person who bought a blessing prayed for it while they paid, and not one of those prayers ever reached the Mother, because I had silenced her." She looked over at Kai, and her pale eyes were frightened. "I always wondered where those prayers were going. I told myself that they simply went nowhere."

"Prayers don’t go nowhere," Kai said, and he didn’t know why he knew that, but he did. "Someone always collects them."

That night, after everyone else had gone to bed, Kai sat on the edge of the well in Hale’s courtyard, closed his eyes, and listened to the gods through Divine Echo for a long while. They were all talking to one another the way they had every night since the Mother was freed, but something was different about them tonight. They sounded frightened, the way people sound when they hear a noise somewhere in their house in the middle of the night.

The Lady of the Silver Moon was the easiest for him to pick out, and as he focused on her soft voice, she seemed to realize that he was listening.

"Little god," the Lady of the Silver Moon said softly. "You sensed it today, did you not? In the coins."

"Syraphim did," Kai whispered. "What is it?"

"It is new," the Lady of the Silver Moon said. "It did not come from our mother’s light, or from any light that was freely given. For forty years, while we were all silent and could not see, something was growing in this city, feeding on every prayer that was paid for." Her voice dropped so low that Kai had to hold his breath to hear the rest. "It is not like us, little god. It does not want to be believed in. It wants to be paid."

Then her voice faded away into the murmur of the others, and Kai sat there in the dark with his heart beating fast.

[Kai]

"I know," Kai whispered. "We need to go and see it."

[We do not have to do this tonight]

"If we wait, he’ll move it," Kai whispered. "Draven moves everything."

They left at the stroke of midnight, just the five of them: Kai and Mira, Garrick with his hammer, Elowen with her sword, and Sunny, who had insisted on coming the moment he found out that it was a god. The merchant district was dead quiet at that time of night, and the old Gilded Exchange stood at the end of a narrow street by the river. It was a big stone building with gold paint chipping off its pillars, and every one of its windows had been boarded up.

The front doors were locked with heavy chains, but there was a door at the back of the building that wasn’t locked at all, and Kai’s stomach tightened when he saw it. An unlocked door was never a good sign, because in Kai’s experience, it usually meant that somebody wanted you to come inside.

"That’s a trap," Mira whispered.

"It’s definitely a trap," Kai whispered back.

"Then why are we going in?" Garrick asked.

"Because whoever set it already knows we’re here," Kai said. "And I would rather walk into a trap on purpose than have it walk into Hale’s house."

The inside of the old Exchange was one large room with a marble floor covered in dust, and at the far end of it, a wide staircase led down into the darkness. Light was coming up from the bottom of the stairs, along with a sound that made Kai’s skin crawl, a slow and steady clinking, like someone counting coins one at a time.

They all went down the stairs together, with Sunny leading the way and Garrick bringing up the rear, and when they reached the bottom, they found the cellar that Pell had described.

It was much larger than the room above, and it was filled almost to the ceiling with river rocks, heaped up against every wall. In the center of the room stood a long wooden table with a single lantern on it, and a pale man in a gray coat sat at the table, dropping rocks into a bag one at a time.

Every rock he dropped into the bag turned to gold.

Garrick raised his hammer and Sunny drew his sword halfway out of its sheath, but Elowen stopped them both by putting a hand on each of their arms. Her blindfolded face was turned towards the pale man, and for the first time since Kai had known her, she looked unsure of herself.

"Wait," Elowen said. "There is not much left inside of him. I can barely feel his light at all. Whatever he once was, he has used up most of it."

Kai looked at the pale man the way he used to look at a mark across a crowded room, and he understood what Elowen meant. The man’s coat was expensive but filthy, and it hung off his bony shoulders as if it had been made for someone twice his size. His fingernails were cracked and gray with rock dust, and there was a plate of food at the end of the table that had gone stale a long time ago, untouched.

The pale man looked up at them as they came off the stairs, and Kai saw that Pell had been right. The man’s eyes were the exact color of a new coin, and he didn’t blink.

"Welcome," the pale man said politely, in a voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used in a long time. "My master has been waiting for you."

"Draven?" Kai asked.

The pale man smiled, and it was a strange, empty smile, like a painting of a smile.

"No," the pale man said. "Lord Draven is only a customer."

Then the lantern on the table flared, and the light in the cellar changed from yellow to gold, and a voice spoke to Kai through Divine Echo. It didn’t sound like the Lady of the Silver Moon or the Tide Mother, or even like the Mother herself. It sounded like a great pile of coins sliding across a marble floor, and it was smiling.

"Ah," the voice said. "The little god who does not charge. I have wanted to meet you for so very long."

Kai felt Syraphim go perfectly still inside his chest. Beside him, Sunny gasped and tightened his grip on his sword, and from the looks on everyone’s faces, Kai knew that they could all hear it too.

"Who are you?" Kai whispered.

"I am what happens when people pay for their prayers for forty years," the voice said cheerfully. "I am the bargain, little god. I am what things cost. And I would like to make you an offer." The gold light pulsed, and every rock in the room glimmered at once. "I can give you a hundred believers by tomorrow morning. All you have to do is name your price."

[Kai, do not answer him]

Kai stood at the bottom of the stairs with every rock in the room shining at him, and he realized that he was looking at the biggest con artist he had ever met.

[338 days. Ninety-eight true believers to go]