Chapter 21: The Price of Cores

The wound opened again while he slept.

Aren woke at noon with his shirt glued to his side and a fever burning behind his eyes. The strips of cloth around his waist were soaked through, and when he peeled them back, the long cut from his ribs to his hip had gone an angry red at the edges and smelled wrong. The guardian’s core had closed it enough to get him home, but not enough to keep him alive.

’Great! Survived a Level 8 monster, killed by a shirt.’

He sat on the edge of his mattress and made himself think clearly. The Academy infirmary was out, because Healer Brannick would take one look and ask what had done it, and there was no staircase in the world that opened a boy from rib to hip. The healer house in the lower city would ask the same thing more gently, and then the nurse would tell Nell.

That left one person.

Old Mag looked at the wound for barely two seconds. Then she put down her pipe, took him by the arm, and marched him out the back of her shop, across a yard full of fish crates and in through the back door of the butcher’s next door.

The butcher was an old man called Doran, with huge red hands and no hair at all, who according to Mag had spent thirty years as a surgeon in the King’s army before he got tired of cutting soldiers and switched to pigs. He didn’t ask a single question, which Aren deeply appreciated. He laid Aren on a wooden table that smelled of salt and blood, gave him a leather strap to bite, washed the cut with something that burned like fire, and closed it with thirty small, neat stitches. Then he spread a thick grey paste over it from a jar Mag handed him, and the fire faded to a dull, heavy ache.

"Keep it dry." Doran wiped his hands carefully. "Don’t fight anything for a week. If it goes black, come back. If it goes green, find a priest."

"Is that a joke?"

"Do I look funny?"

Aren lay on the table sweating and tried to remember how breathing worked.

"Three cores for Doran, and one for the salve."

He turned his head. "Four? That salve isn’t worth a whole core."

"It wasn’t, yesterday." Mag sat down on a crate and relit her pipe. "Seven Rifts in one night, child. Every hunter in the city spent this morning dragging sacks of cores to market. The Guild alone brought in four hundred. What happens to the price of a thing when the whole city has a sack of it?"

He knew perfectly well what happened.

"How bad?"

"An E-rank core was nearly a crown on Wednesday. This morning it’s half that, and it’ll be less by tonight." She blew a thin line of smoke at the ceiling. "The hunters are celebrating. They haven’t worked out yet that they’ve just made themselves poor."

Aren took four of his five cores out of his pocket and set them on the crate beside her. He had very nearly died for those. Two days ago they would have paid off a third of what he owed Rook, and now they bought thirty stitches and a jar of grey paste.

’My first market crash in this world, and I’m on the wrong side of it.’

He kept the last core, because prices like that always came back eventually, and he could wait.

The Academy had cancelled classes for the day. When he limped in through the kitchen gate that evening, the main courtyard was crowded with students reading a long sheet of paper nailed to the doors of the Great Hall.

It was the list of the dead. Forty-three names. Aren read them slowly from the back of the crowd. Thirty-one were from the lower city and the east bank, fishermen and dockworkers and a baker and two children. Four were from the merchant quarter, four were city guards, and the last four were from the Upper Ring, including a minor noble called Lord Ellery Vance whose family kept a box at the tournament every year.

Around him, people were whispering.

"Four in the Upper Ring. Thirty-one at the docks."

"The Royal Knights went to the cathedral first. Fifty of them. The fish market got eight guards and a sergeant."

"The cathedral Rift was a D, though. Obviously they went there first."

"My uncle was a dockworker," said a quiet voice beside him.

It was Fenwick, the boy with the squeaky voice and the Lamplighter class, who had spent three weeks of mornings calling Aren Zero and laughing about it. He wasn’t laughing now. He was staring fixedly at one name near the top of the list, and his face looked blank and very young.

"He was on the east bank. By the tanneries." Fenwick swallowed. "Nobody came there at all."

Aren thought about the roped-off dye house the guard had called harmless. That Rift hadn’t killed anyone, but he understood what Fenwick meant, and he didn’t have anything useful to say, so he simply stood next to him until the crowd thinned.

Mira found him on the dormitory steps later that night and sat down heavily without asking.

"My father’s boat is gone." "One of those flying fish things smashed it against the pier. Everyone’s alive, Mother’s fine. Father’s just sitting in the kitchen staring at the wall." She pulled her knees up to her chest. "Twenty years he had that boat. He bought it the year I was born."

"I’m sorry."

"The Guild’s offering contracts now. Ten coppers a day to haul rubble out of the fish market." Her voice went completely flat. "Ten coppers to clean up the street the city didn’t bother defending. He’ll take it. He has to."

They sat quietly in the dark without talking. Across the city, the smoke from the seven Rifts had thinned into a grey haze hanging over the river.

Classes started again the next morning, and the Headmaster had ordered every instructor to spend the first hour explaining what had happened. In the Class D basement, that meant Professor Crane at the front of the room with his scroll, looking as bored as a man reading out grain prices.

"For those of you who slept through your childhood, the Kingdom of Aldermere sits on the continent of Eldrath, and this city, Highcrest, is its capital. The King lives in the palace in the Upper Ring. The great houses keep their mansions near him, the merchants live below them, and the rest of you live below the merchants." He turned a page. "To the north lies the Iron Empire, which would very much like to own us. To the south lie the Free Cities, which would very much like to sell us things. The Church of the Light is everywhere, and would very much like to forgive us, for a fee."

A few people laughed nervously, but Crane didn’t.

"Under all of it lies the Abyss. Rifts are wounds where the Abyss pushes through, and they’ve always opened, usually one or two a month somewhere in the kingdom and rarely in the capital." He paused. "Seven in one night has never happened in this city’s history."

A girl in the second row put up her hand. "Has it happened anywhere, Professor?"

"Three hundred years ago, there was a kingdom to the west called Valdris, larger and richer than Aldermere. In the years before it fell, its Rifts began to open more often. Two a month, then five, then seven in a night." He rolled up his scroll. "Then came the Great Tide, and in a single season Valdris was gone. This Academy was founded by the people who survived it, so that it would never happen here."

The basement had gone completely silent.

"Professor?" Fenwick’s voice came very quietly from the back. "Is this a Tide?"

For once, Crane’s thin face wasn’t bored.

"No," he said. And then, after a moment: "Not yet."

That night Aren sat on his mattress with the black stake across his knees. It was still humming softly, like something breathing in its sleep, and he ran his thumb over the tiny runes and thought about the man in the grey robe face-down in the water with a ritual knife on his belt.

Seven Rifts in a ring around the city. A dead man in a robe. A kingdom that fell after its Rifts started opening more often.

He laughed softly, and it hurt his stitches.

’A secret cult opening gates before the end of the world. I read that a hundred times on Earth at three in the morning, rolling my eyes every single time. Oldest, laziest cliché in the genre.’

’And in every single one of those stories, it was true!’

He didn’t know who they were yet, or what they wanted, and he didn’t need to. He only needed to answer one question first: who got richer if this kept happening?

He carefully wrapped the stake in his spare shirt, pushed it deep into the slit in his mattress, and lay down beside it in the dark.

[Unidentified object. Vibration increasing.]