Chapter 21 Core Market

Audit of T. Marsh. Note 23. Coldwater. Crown depot purchases, last nine years, in a column. The column goes down every year without exception, like a man walking down a staircase in the dark. I have seen columns like this before. I saw one when I was eleven. H.Q.

Coldwater was a stockade on a river, at the very edge of the Greywild, and it smelled of money.

You could smell it before you saw it. Wood smoke and wet hides and horse dung, and under all that, something sharp and sweet, like the air before a lightning storm. I knew that smell. I'd smelled it every morning of my life, walking past the chook-shed door.

The stockade was big, a good deal bigger than Thornfell's whole wall, and newer, with a gate on the road side and a wharf on the river side where long flat boats were tied up. Inside it there was a muddy square, an inn, two smithies, a chapel, a lot of trappers' huts, and two big buildings facing each other across the square like men squaring up for a fight.

The one on the left was stone and old, with the royal crest over the door, faded nearly to nothing. A sign said CROWN CRYSTAL DEPOT. Its shutters were half closed. There was nobody outside it.

The one on the right was timber and new and three storeys high. It had no crest. It had a long porch with a counter along it, and a queue of trappers at the counter with sacks on their backs, and two big men with clubs standing either end of the porch. Over the door, painted in neat black letters, it said D AND V. FRONTIER GOODS. BEST PRICES PAID.

I looked at that a while.

Beside me, Miss Quill and the princess looked at it too. Miss Quill had her satchel clutched against her chest with both arms. The princess had gone very still, the way she did.

"Dunmore and Vey," Miss Quill said, very quietly.

"Who?" I said.

Neither of them answered me.

* * *

The depot factor was a fat, frightened man called Orrin Pask, who'd been at Coldwater twenty years and looked like he'd spent most of them sweating. He met us in his office with his hands shaking, and when the princess put the royal warrant on his desk, the real one out of her riding coat with the big red seal on it, he sat down without being asked.

"Your Highness," he said. "I've written. Every year, I've written. Nobody answers."

"I'm answering," said the princess. "Show me the books."

He showed her the books, all nine years of them. Miss Quill and the princess sat side by side at his desk and went through them, page by page, and I stood by the door with the cleaver on my back and watched their faces. I couldn't read the books, not the way they could. But I could read faces.

The depot paid the Crown's price for crystals. Fixed, by law, for a hundred years. Five silver for a small one. A gold for a good one. Ten gold for a great one, the kind you got once a season, if you were lucky.

D and V paid double. Sometimes triple. They'd opened their porch across the square nine years ago, Pask said, and within a year every trapper on the river was selling to them. He'd written to Harrowgate. Nobody had answered. He'd written again. A man had come out from the city, very polite, and told him it was a free market and he should mind his depot and stop wasting the Crown's paper.

"Who was the man?" the princess asked.

Pask wiped his face with a damp handkerchief. "He had a ring. With a tower on it."

The princess and Miss Quill looked at each other.

"Where do D and V's crystals go?" said Miss Quill.

"Downriver. By boat. Every month." Pask looked at the window, at the warehouse across the square. "But not all of them. The best ones, the big ones, the ones from the deep country, they keep in there. In the strongroom at the back. Under guard. I've never seen inside." He swallowed. "They don't let anyone see inside."

The princess stood up and picked up her warrant.

"Then let's go and see inside," she said.

* * *

Sir Gareth didn't like it.

He came across the square at a fast walk as we went, with his two officers behind him, and planted himself on the porch steps of D and V in front of the princess.

"Your Highness. This is private premises. Your warrant covers the Crown depot. It gives you no authority over a private merchant."

"Read it, Commander," said the princess.

She held it up. He didn't take it.

"Any premises within the Coldwater district dealing in frontier crystals," she said, without looking at it. She knew it by heart. "That's what it says. I asked for that wording. Nobody on my father's council thought it mattered. Nobody on my father's council ever reads anything I write." She looked up at him. "Stand aside, please."

He stood there. His face was very red. His hand was on his sword hilt.

Behind me, Brakka's warband had come up into the square, all ten of them. They didn't do anything. They just stood there. Grosh had his little book out.

Sir Gareth stood aside.

* * *

Curious about the source? The chapter was copied from without consent, and reading it there supports its author.

The men with clubs didn't argue either, once they'd seen the warrant and Brakka. A clerk with a tower ring on his finger came out from the back and argued instead, very fast and very politely, and the princess listened to him with her head on one side for about ten seconds and then told Rusk to sit him down in a chair and keep him there. Rusk did, with one hand, while holding his ribs with the other.

The clerk's keys were on his belt. The princess took them.

The strongroom was at the back, behind an iron door. It took two keys and a lever to open. Inside it was cold, colder than the day, and dark, and there was that smell again, sharp and sweet, so strong it made the hair on my arms stand up.

Miss Quill lit a lamp.

There were shelves. Floor to ceiling, all round the room, timber shelves with felt laid on them. And on the felt, in rows, with little paper tags tied to them with string, were crystals.

Hundreds of them. Every size from a thumb to a fist. Red and gold and green and white, all glowing faintly, so that the whole room was full of a low shifting light, like being inside a lantern. The tags were written in a neat clerk's hand. Where they'd come from. Who'd sold them. What D and V had paid.

The princess walked along the shelves slowly, reading tags.

Miss Quill didn't. She'd stopped just inside the door, and she'd gone white, and she was looking at the back wall.

On the back wall, on its own shelf, on a cushion of dark blue velvet, there were six crystals.

They were bigger than the others. Each was about the size of my fist. They were a deep, warm gold, all six of them, with a slow light moving inside like honey being stirred.

I knew them before I'd taken three steps.

I'd have known them anywhere. I'd carried every one of them from a barn floor to a chook-shed door. The one on the left had a chip out of one side where Duchess trod on the sack when I was fifteen.

The tag on them said: Thornfell district. Pedlar, Tibbet. Paid, two silver. Grade, calamity. Estimated value, four thousand crowns each.

* * *

I don't know how long I stood there.

The princess had come round beside me. She read the tag. She didn't say anything.

"I sold those," I said. "To a pedlar. For eleven copper. Old Tibbet. He gets lost up our track once a year." I heard my voice and it sounded strange, a long way off. "He bought them for the kids. Because they glow."

"Four thousand," said the princess quietly. "Each."

"There's forty more," I said. "In the sack. On the chook-shed door. Holding it open."

There was a small sound by the door. It was Miss Quill. She'd put both hands over her mouth.

Brakka had come in behind her and was reading the tag over her shoulder, slowly, with her lips moving. When she got to the end she straightened up and looked at me, and then at the six rocks, and then at me again.

"Fuck me," she said. She'd learned it off Rusk on the road and she'd been waiting for the right moment. "Four thousand. For one rock. And my husband paid for the King's arm out of his sock."

"It wasn't a sock. It was a purse."

"It was a sock," said Brakka. "I saw it. It had a hole."

Grosh, behind her, wrote something in his book.

On the next shelf down, by itself, there was a crate. A small stout crate with iron corners, open on top. Inside, packed in straw, was another crystal, bigger than any of mine, black and red. The tag said: Ruin Wyrm. Deep country. Paid, three hundred crowns. Reserved for M.K.

Ruin Wyrm.

I'd seen that on the Guild board, my first day in Harrowgate. Four hundred gold. Gold rank minimum. Party of six. Do not engage alone. I'd read it twice and thought, a wyrm, that's a sort of dragon, and gone on to the lost dog.

Grey armour plates the size of shovel blades. Acid. Deep-dweller. Calamity class.

I looked at the black and red crystal in the straw. Then I looked at my six on their velvet cushion. They were the same. Not the same colour. The same thing. The same weight to them, the same feel in the air. Like two different breeds of the same cow.

"Miss Quill," I said.

"Yes."

"What's a Ruin Wyrm?"

She took her hands away from her mouth. She didn't answer straight away. When she did, she said it carefully, the way you'd step across a creek on stones.

"Armoured. About three cart-lengths. A head that's mostly mouth, with the teeth set backwards. A ring of yellow eyes. Acid saliva." She stopped. "A soft seam under the jaw, according to the bestiary. Only reachable when it rears."

I didn't say anything.

"Nine have been killed in the Guild's history," she said. "Each one by a party of at least six. Most of the parties didn't all come home."

* * *

It's a big thing to take in, all at once. I didn't take it in. Not then.

What I did was look at the six rocks on their velvet and think, very clearly: Dad called them mine rats.

And then: that's what the city calls them, that's all. Ruin Wyrm. City people give everything a long name. You go to Harrowgate and a pie costs four copper and a rat's a calamity. It was the same animal, but out at our place it was just a big rat, coming up the drain once a month, and anyone who'd grown up with them would have learned the trick with the seam the way I had. It was just that nobody here had grown up with them.

I thought that. I made myself think it all the way through.

It didn't hold. I could feel it not holding, the way you can feel a fence post's gone soft at the bottom when you lean on it. But I leaned on it anyway, because there wasn't anything else to lean on.

* * *

The princess had gone through the clerk's desk while I stood there. Miss Quill had gone with her. When I came out of the strongroom they were standing at the desk with a ledger open between them, a big black one with brass corners, the kind a man keeps when he wants to know exactly what everything cost.

They were both very calm. That's how I knew it was bad. They were the calmest I'd ever seen either of them.

"Tobin," said the princess. It was the first time she'd used my name like that. "Come and look at this."

I went and looked. I couldn't make sense of most of it. Columns of numbers, dates, names. Miss Quill put her finger on the lines she wanted me to see, one by one, and read them out, and I listened.

Purchases. Nine years of them, all the best crystals off the river, all paid for out of an account in Harrowgate, through Dunmore and Vey, Factors. The account had a name on it, here, in the clerk's own book, the way you'd write it if you never thought anyone would look. Household of the Lord Chancellor. M. Kell.

Then other entries, at the back. Not crystals. Land. Fourteen frontier holdings bought by D and V over eight years, up and down the Greywild, all of them empty, all bought cheap just after the owners died or left or couldn't pay. Then the Corran place. Then the Selby place. Twelve gold each. Six weeks before the tax went up.

And at the very bottom, in a different ink, newer than the rest.

Marsh Hold, Thornfell. Tax revision effected. Holding to revert to Crown by first frost; transfer to D and V by arrangement. Priority. Occupant has refused previous offers through agent.

"I never had any offers," I said.

"Your father did," said Miss Quill. "I'd guess. Before he died. And he refused them."

He'd never said. Not one word.

I stood there and read the last line again. Then again. The words didn't change.

"The tax," I said. "It's not a tax."

"No," said the princess.

"It was never meant to be paid."

"No."

"They just wanted the farm."

"Not the farm," said Miss Quill. Her voice was very low and very steady. "What's under it. Whatever makes these." She touched the ledger, on the line about the strongroom, the six on velvet. "Somebody has been buying calamity cores off the frontier for nine years. Bright ones. Better than any depot ever bought. And emptying farms along the Greywild one at a time. And yours is the one that wouldn't empty."

Out in the square, somebody was shouting. A horse screamed. The warband started singing something low and warlike, all at once, like a dog growling.

I looked out through the clerk's window. Sir Gareth was standing on the porch steps of D and V, with his back to us, talking to one of his officers very fast. The officer nodded, and turned, and ran for the horse lines.

The princess shut the black ledger, picked it up and held it against her chest with both arms.

"I think," she said, "the Commander has seen what we've found."