The wound opened again in his sleep.
Aren woke at noon with his shirt glued to his side and a fever burning behind his eyes.
The strips of cloth he had tied around his waist were soaked through.
When he peeled them back, the long cut from his ribs to his hip had turned an angry red at the edges, and it smelled wrong.
The guardian’s core had closed it enough to let him walk home.
It had not closed it enough to keep him alive.
He sat on the edge of his mattress and made himself think.
The Academy infirmary was out.
Healer Brannick would take one look at a cut like this and ask what had made it, and there was no staircase in the world that opened a boy’s side from rib to hip.
The healer house in the lower city would ask the same questions, more gently, and the nurse would tell Nell.
That left one person.
Old Mag looked at the wound for about two seconds.
Then she put down her pipe, took him by the arm, and walked him out the back of her shop, through a yard full of fish crates, and into the back door of the butcher’s shop next door.
The butcher was an old man named Doran with huge red hands and no hair at all.
He had been a surgeon in the King’s army for thirty years, Mag said, before he got tired of cutting soldiers and started cutting pigs instead.
He did not ask Aren a single question.
He laid him on a wooden table that smelled of blood and salt, gave him a leather strap to bite, cleaned the wound with something that burned like fire, and sewed it closed with thirty small, neat stitches.
Then he spread a thick grey paste over it from a jar Mag handed him, and the burning faded to a dull, heavy ache.
“Keep it dry,” Doran said, wiping his hands.
“Don’t fight anything for a week.
If it goes black, come back.
If it goes green, find a priest.”
Aren lay on the table, sweating, and tried to remember how to breathe normally.
“That’s three cores for Doran,” Mag said, “and one for the salve.”
He turned his head and looked at her.
“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 opened in one night, child.
Every hunter in the city spent the morning carrying sacks of cores to market.
The Guild alone brought in four hundred.
Do you know what happens to the price of something when the whole city has a sack of it?”
He knew.
A flood of supply, and the price fell through the floor.
“How much?”
“An E-rank core was worth nearly a crown on Wednesday,” Mag said.
“This morning, it’s worth half that.
Maybe less by tonight.” She blew out a thin line of smoke.
“The hunters are celebrating.
They don’t understand yet that they just made themselves poor.”
Aren took four of the five cores out of his pocket and put them on the crate beside her.
He had nearly died for those cores.
Two days ago, they would have paid off a third of his debt to Rook.
Now they paid for thirty stitches and a jar of grey paste.
In a crash, he thought, the people with cash buy everything cheap.
The people who have to sell lose everything.
He had always been one of the people with cash.
It was very strange to be on the other side.
He put the last core back in his pocket.
He did not sell it.
He would hold it until the price came back up.
It always did.
The Academy had cancelled all classes for the day.
When he limped back through the kitchen gate that evening, the main courtyard was full of students standing in front of the great doors of the hall, reading a long sheet of paper nailed to the wood.
It was the list of the dead.
Forty-three names.
Aren read them slowly, standing at the back of the crowd.
Thirty-one of them were from the lower city and the east bank.
Fishermen, dockworkers, a baker, two children.
Four were from the merchant quarter.
Four were city guards.
The last four were from the Upper Ring, and one of them was a minor noble, Lord Ellery Vance, whose family had a box at the Academy’s tournament every year.
Around him, students 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.
Of course they went there first.”
“My uncle was a dockworker,” said a quiet voice beside him.
Aren turned.
It was Fenwick, the boy with the squeaky voice and the Lamplighter class, who had spent every morning for three weeks calling him Zero and laughing.
He was not laughing now.
He was staring at one name on the list, near the top, and his face was blank and very young.
“He was on the east bank,” Fenwick said.
“By the tanneries.
Nobody came there at all.”
Aren thought about the old dye house, the roped-off Rift that the guard had called harmless.
It had not been the one that killed anyone.
But he understood what Fenwick meant.
Nobody had come.
Mira found him on the dormitory steps later that night.
She sat down beside him without asking.
“My father’s boat is gone,” she said.
“Smashed against the pier by one of those flying fish things.
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 is offering contracts now.
Ten silver a day to haul rubble out of the fish market.” Her voice was flat.
“Ten silver to clean up the street the city didn’t bother to defend.
He’ll take it.
He has to.”
They sat together in the dark for a while.
Across the city, the smoke from the seven Rifts had thinned into a grey haze that hung 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 basement of Class D, that meant Professor Crane, standing at the front of the room with his scroll, looking as bored as a man reading a list of grain prices.
“For those of you who slept through your childhood,” he said, “the Kingdom of Aldermere sits on the continent of Eldrath.
This city, Highcrest, is its capital.
The King lives in the palace in the Upper Ring.
The great noble houses keep their mansions near him.
The merchants live below them.
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 students laughed nervously.
Crane did not.
“Under all of it lies the Abyss,” he went on.
“Rifts are wounds where the Abyss pushes through into our continent.
They have always opened.
In Aldermere, usually one or two a month, somewhere in the kingdom.
Rarely in the capital.” He paused.
“Seven in one night has not happened in this city’s history.”
A girl in the second row raised her hand.
“Has it happened anywhere, Professor?”
Crane looked at her.
“Three hundred years ago,” he said, “there was a kingdom to the west called Valdris.
It was larger than Aldermere and richer.
In the years before it fell, the Rifts there began to open more and more often.
Two a month.
Then five.
Then seven in a night.” He rolled up his scroll.
“Then came the Great Tide.
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 was completely silent.
“Professor,” Fenwick said quietly, from the back.
“Is this a Tide?”
Crane looked at him.
For once, his thin face was not bored.
It was not anything at all.
“No,” he said.
Then, after a moment: “Not yet.”
That night, Aren sat on his mattress with the black stake across his knees.
It was still humming, very softly, like something breathing in its sleep.
He ran his fingers over the tiny runes and thought about the man in the grey robe lying in the water, the bone knife at his belt, the stake driven into the floor under a sleeping guardian, where nobody would ever find it.
Seven Rifts in a circle around the city.
A dead man in a robe.
A ritual knife.
A kingdom that had fallen after Rifts began to open more often.
He almost laughed, and it hurt his stitches.
A secret cult, he thought, opening gates before the end of the world.
He had read it in a hundred stories, back on Earth, at three in the morning, rolling his eyes every single time.
It was the oldest, laziest cliché in the whole genre.
It had also always been true, in every one of those stories.
He did not know who they were yet.
He did not know what they wanted.
He didn’t need to.
He only needed to know one thing.
Who gets richer if this keeps happening?
He wrapped the stake in his spare shirt, pushed it deep into the slit in his mattress, and lay down beside it in the dark.
Tomorrow, he would start finding out.
[Unidentified object.
Vibration increasing.]