Chapter 27: The Book

The Old Quarry had changed.

Aren saw it from the hill above the pit, lying flat in the long grass with his hood pulled low. Three weeks ago, nobody came here. Now four tents stood at the edge of the quarry with a cookfire between them and men in mismatched armor sitting around it, and a wooden sign had been hammered into the ground beside the path down, painted with the crest of the Hunters’ Guild, a hammer crossed with a spear.

He understood almost immediately. After the Night of Bells, core prices had crashed, and now they were climbing back faster than anyone expected, because every noble family in Highcrest had suddenly decided its children needed to be stronger. The Guild had noticed, marched out to the only E-rank Rift within a day’s walk of the city, put up a sign, and started charging.

’Wonderful! The one place I could farm for free, and someone discovered capitalism.’

He wasn’t going to pay the Guild to get in, and he certainly wasn’t going to stroll past six professional hunters at their campfire with a soldier’s sword on his hip and a face they might remember. So he watched for an hour and then went around the long way, through the brambles on the north side, to the old ledge where the stone cutters had once lowered their blocks on ropes. The ropes were long gone. The ledge was steep and crumbling, and nobody in their right mind would climb down it in the dark.

He climbed down it in the dark, very slowly.

There were no Quarry Brutes near the top anymore. The Guild had cleared the upper canyons neatly and left nothing behind but footprints and cold ashes, so he had to go deeper than he had ever gone, past the round pit where Vivienne had fought her Trial and into the narrow canyons beyond it, where the walls leaned so close overhead that the moonlight barely reached the ground.

He found two Brutes there, one after the other, and killed both of them exactly as he had killed his first: slowly, carefully, with a plan, loose stones, and the half-step of Moonlit Step that a Brute could never quite follow. He used the crescent only once, small and tight and exactly the size he wanted, and it went precisely where he sent it. Thirty-one percent mastery, and he could feel the difference in every swing.

He absorbed both cores sitting wearily on the canyon floor.

[Rank E: Level 2 → Level 3.]

One level, for two monsters that could have killed him, a cliff in the dark, and a whole night without sleep. He climbed back up the crumbling ledge as the sky went grey and lay in the brambles at the top, breathing hard and working out the cost of the next one. Level 4 would take twice as many cores, Level 5 twice that again, and at this rate he would see Level 10 sometime around the end of next year. Vivienne had gained three levels in three weeks out of locked boxes.

’Her gate gets narrower. Mine stays wide open. That’s the theory, anyway. The theory doesn’t make the cliff any shorter.’

Rook sent for him that afternoon.

The warehouse looked different. The crates of weapons were gone, and in their place were long tables where men sat with ledgers, stacks of paper and small iron boxes. Aren recognized some of them from the night in the Tanners’ yard. They were all writing numbers.

Rook sat in his tall chair on the platform with his book open on his knee and didn’t bother to look up.

"The Founders’ Festival." "Thirty days from now. Every student at the Academy fights an exhibition duel in front of half the city. Nobles, merchants, everyone." He turned a page. "Do you know how much money changes hands on those duels, stone-seller?"

Aren looked at the men with the ledgers. "A lot."

"This is the three hundredth Festival, and it will be bigger than any before it. The nobles bet on their friends’ children. The merchants bet on the nobles. The dockworkers bet on anyone who looks like they might bleed." He closed the book. "And every year, somebody takes all of those bets, holds the money, pays the winners and keeps the rest. This year, that somebody is me."

"You’re making a book."

"I’m making the book. The only one in this city that matters." Rook’s thin smile appeared. "Mother Hesk used to run it. She doesn’t run anything anymore."

That was when Aren finally understood why he had been called, and the old instinct stirred in his chest, the one that always woke up when someone was about to make a mistake with a great deal of money.

"You need to know the odds."

"I need to know the students. Who’s strong, who’s weak, who’s pretending to be one or the other, who’s been bought good cores and who’s hurt and hiding it." Rook folded his long hands. "My men can watch from outside. You live inside. You carry their books, sweep their halls, hold their swords, and they talk in front of you like you’re furniture. You’ll tell me everything."

"For how much?"

Rook’s dark eyes rested on him. "For the honor of serving me, stone-seller."

"I’d rather have money."

Some of the men at the tables looked up sharply, because nobody talked to Rook like that. Aren kept his face pleasant and waited, the way he used to wait in meetings with men who could ruin him.

"Ten percent of the profits."

"My loan forgiven, principal and interest. And twenty percent."

"Fifteen."

"Fifteen and the loan."

Rook stared at him in silence, then laughed, the soft unhappy laugh of a man who had just been outplayed by someone he had expected to own.

"Done."

[Rook. Hostility: 91% → 94%.]

Aren bowed, and in his head he was already drawing columns. Class A, Class B, the upper years. Who he could watch, who he could ask, who was lying about their level. For the first time in weeks he was doing the thing he had been born to do, in either life.

He spent the next six days building the book, and he didn’t write a single thing down inside the Academy. He listened in the dining hall. He listened while he carried swords and ledgers and laundry. He watched the training yards from behind the crates he was pretending to move, and with Street Fighter’s Instinct, five minutes of watching anyone train was enough to see exactly where they would break.

He learned that Lord Aldous Penrose, the weak-chinned liar from his trial, was secretly terrified of fire and flinched every time a Flame student raised a hand near him. He learned that a Class B girl with a C-rank lightning class had been buying cheap Free City cores from a dealer who cut them with ground glass, that her essence was going sour, and that she would probably lose her first duel in under a minute. He learned that Celia Penrose’s healing hands had started shaking after the Training Rift and hadn’t stopped. He learned that the second-year everyone called the best swordsman in the Academy was secretly being trained by a girl from Class C, and that she was better than him.

Every night he carried it all down to the warehouse, and Rook’s men turned it into numbers.

On the sixth night he finished the last name on his list. Rook was waiting on the platform, reading the long columns of odds.

"Good." It was the first time Aren had ever heard him say it. "Very good." He turned a page. "There’s one more thing you should know. Someone came to see me yesterday. A man I didn’t know, well dressed and well spoken, who wanted to place a bet. A very large one." He set the ledger down. "Five hundred gold crowns."

Aren’s skin went cold. Five hundred crowns was more than most families in the Upper Ring could put on a table in one night.

"On who?"

"Not on who. On what." Rook’s eyes didn’t move from his face. "He bet five hundred crowns that Lady Vivienne Ashgrave would not finish the Founders’ Festival."

The warehouse went quiet. Even the men at the tables had stopped writing.

"Not that she would lose." Rook’s voice was soft. "That she wouldn’t finish. I took the bet, naturally. I’d be a fool not to! Nobody has ever beaten the Ashgrave girl." He picked up his book again. "But I thought you’d want to know."

"What did he look like?"

"Grey eyes. Grey coat. A very calm face." Rook still didn’t look up. "He paid in old coins. Valdris gold, three hundred years old. I had to have them weighed."