The Chronicles room was on the fourth floor of the library, behind a locked iron gate, and Aren had the key.
Not officially.
Officially, the key belonged to the head librarian, a nervous old man who hated stairs.
But for three weeks, Crane had been sending his Servant up and down the library with stacks of ledgers, and the head librarian had started handing Aren the whole key ring to save his knees.
Nobody had ever asked for it back.
The room was small and dusty and smelled of old leather.
The books on its shelves were the histories of Eldrath, written by hand over hundreds of years, too old and too fragile to leave the room.
Students needed a teacher’s permission to read them.
Aren did not have permission.
He had a stack of ledgers in his arms, in case anyone came up the stairs, and two hours before Crane would wonder where he was.
He found the book he wanted on the third shelf.
The Chronicle of the Red Century.
It was thick and heavy, bound in faded red leather, and when he pulled it out, a small card slipped from between the pages and fell on the floor.
It was a borrowing card.
Every book in the Chronicles room had one.
Names and dates, written in the librarian’s shaky hand.
Most of the dates were decades old.
The last line was from eight days ago.
One week before the Night of Bells.
Borrowed by: G.
Crane.
Aren looked at the card.
Then he put it back exactly where he had found it, and opened the book.
Valdris had been a great kingdom.
The Chronicle said so on almost every page, in the proud, flowery language of a writer who had loved it.
It had had seven cities and a capital called Varn, with white walls and golden roofs.
It had had its own Academy, older than Highcrest.
It had had more S-rank Awakened than any kingdom on the continent.
And then, over ten years, it had started to die.
The writer had not understood it while it was happening.
Aren could see that in the way the entries changed.
First, the Rifts became more common.
A note here, a note there.
Three Rifts this month in the eastern provinces.
Unusual.
Then, a few pages later: Five this month.
The King has sent knights.
Then whole pages of lists, cities and dates, more and more of them, until the handwriting got faster and messier, as if the writer had been running out of time.
Near the end, there was a drawing.
It was a map of Varn, the capital, drawn in brown ink.
Around the city, in a perfect ring, there were seven small marks, like wounds.
Under the drawing, the writer had written one line.
On the night of the Seven Wounds, the Hollow Choir sang, and the deep answered.
Aren read the next few pages twice, slowly.
The Hollow Choir had been a group of monks, or something like monks, who wore grey and lived in the mountains of Valdris.
Nobody had taken them seriously.
They believed that the Abyss was not a wound, but a door, and that the world on this side of it was sick and needed to be washed clean.
They believed the Great Tide was a cure.
When the Tide came and Valdris drowned, the Chronicle said, the Hollow Choir vanished with it.
Most historians later decided they had never really existed at all.
Aren closed the book.
Then he went to the big map of Highcrest that hung on the wall by the window, the one the librarians used for teaching, and stood in front of it.
He did not need a pen.
He knew where the seven Rifts had opened.
The docks.
The east bank, by the tanneries.
The merchant quarter.
The cathedral.
The second Upper Ring Rift, by the old gardens.
The north wall.
The river gate.
He traced them in the air with one finger, one after another.
They made a ring.
Not a perfect one.
But close enough.
And in the very center of it, on the hill above the city, stood the Academy.
Old Mag did not even let him finish.
He had copied a few of the runes from the stake onto a scrap of paper, a single line of them, small and careful.
He put it on her counter.
She looked at it for one second, and her face went the color of old candle wax.
She picked up the paper with two fingers, held it over the flame of her lamp, and watched it burn to black ash on the counter.
“Don’t ever bring that into my shop again,” she said quietly.
“Mag…”
“I mean it, child.” Her one eye did not blink.
“Thirty years I’ve sold things nobody else would touch.
Monster bones.
Cursed blades.
Once, a hand that still moved.
I don’t scare easy.” She brushed the ash off the counter with the side of her hand.
“Two months ago, a man came to the docks selling iron nails with marks on them like those.
A fence I knew bought three of them.
A week later, the fence was gone.
His shop was empty.
His bed was still warm.” She looked at him.
“I don’t know who makes those things.
I don’t want to know.
And I don’t want you knowing either.”
“Then who would?”
Mag was silent thinking.
Then she picked up her pipe and looked away.
“Somebody who isn’t afraid of the Abyss,” she said.
“And there’s only one of those in this city that I know of.”
She did not say the name of the street.
She did not need to.
Rook was reading when Aren came into the warehouse, the same as always.
He did not look up while Aren told him about the seven Rifts and the ring and the Hollow Choir.
He did not look up when Aren said the word cult.
He only turned a page.
“So,” Rook said, when Aren had finished.
“A group of madmen in grey robes want to drown the world.” He sounded mildly bored.
“That is a very interesting story, stone-seller.
It is also completely useless.”
“Why?”
“Because madmen need money.” Rook finally looked up.
His dark eyes were calm.
“Iron nails do not forge themselves.
Ritual knives are not free.
Someone had to pay for seven men to walk into seven parts of my city in one night without being seen.
Someone had to feed them, hide them, bribe the guards who did not see them.” He closed his book.
“You don’t find a snake by asking what it believes.
You find it by asking who feeds it.
So.
Who got richer this week?”
Aren had been thinking about it since the night he pulled the stake out of the floor.
He had a list.
He went through it in order.
“The Hunters’ Guild,” he said.
“They took every contract in the city.
Clearing Rifts, hauling rubble, guarding streets.
The cores crashed, but contracts don’t.”
Rook nodded slowly.
“Go on.”
“The Church.
Every funeral goes through them.
Every prayer for the dead costs money.
The cathedral had donation boxes in the street yesterday, and the lines went around the square.” Aren paused.
“Though the cathedral Rift was the biggest one.
It hit their own building.”
“A clever man might put a fire next to his own house,” Rook said, “so nobody would think he lit it.
Go on.”
“The Iron Empire.
They didn’t get richer.
But Aldermere got weaker.
Forty-three dead, the King’s knights tired, the whole city afraid.
If they were planning a war, this is a very good week to start.”
“And?”
Aren hesitated.
He had one more name on his list, and he was not sure about it.
“The Crown,” he said.
“There’s already talk of an emergency tax.
For the defense of the city.”
Rook smiled for the first time.
It was a thin smile, and it did not reach his eyes.
“You’ve missed one, stone-seller.
The most important one.”
Aren waited.
“Who owns the fish market?” Rook asked.
Aren opened his mouth, and closed it again.
“Nobody, as of this morning,” Rook said.
“Half the stalls are ash.
The families who rented them can’t pay to rebuild.
The landlords are already selling the plots, cheap, because nobody wants to build where a Rift opened.
In a month, someone will own the whole square for the price of a carriage.” He leaned back in his tall chair.
“Watch who buys it.
Watch who buys the burned houses on the east bank, and the warehouses by the river gate.
A Rift is a disaster for the people who live there, and a gift for the people who were waiting with money in their hands.”
Aren didn’t move.
He had done exactly this, in his old life.
Not with Rifts.
With floods, with factory fires, with a small war in a country he had never visited.
He had bought the ruins from the people who had lost them, and sold them back at three times the price when the ruins were rebuilt.
He had been very good at it.
He had never once thought about the people who sold.
[Rook.
Hostility: 88% → 89%.]
“You look ill,” Rook said, watching him with interest.
“Did you think you were the only one in this city who knew how to read a market?” He opened his book again.
“Find out who’s buying.
Then you’ll find your snake.”
He did not go home that night.
He walked through the lower city instead, through the streets near the fish market where the smell of smoke still hung in the air, and he thought.
He had a list of suspects now, and every name on it made sense.
The Guild, the Church, the Iron Empire, the Crown, and someone with money waiting to buy the ruins.
Maybe one of them.
Maybe two of them working together.
Maybe none, and the Hollow Choir was paying for itself somehow.
He could watch the land sales.
He could watch the Church’s donations.
He could listen in Rook’s warehouse and Mag’s shop and the Academy’s corridors.
In a month, maybe two, he might understand.
But he did not understand the thing in his mattress.
He did not know what it was, or what it did, or what would happen if the people who made it came looking for the one that was missing.
And he had seen Mag’s face when she looked at those runes.
You did not hold something when you did not know what it was.
You either learned what it was, quickly, or you got rid of it.
There was only one person in Highcrest who was not afraid of the Abyss.
Lantern Street was narrow and very quiet.
Most of its houses had been empty for years.
Halfway down, there was a tall, dark building with boarded-up windows, the kind of place children dared each other to touch on the way home.
Mag had said it had been empty for twenty years.
Tonight, there was light under its door.
Aren stood in the street and looked at that thin line of yellow light.
He thought about the fence who had vanished with his bed still warm, about the Lily, about the twelve crowns a month, and Nell drinking grey salt that tasted like a cold coin.
He took the roll of grey bandages out of his coat and wound it around his head, slowly, until only his eyes were left.
Then he walked to the door.
Before he could knock, a small bell rang somewhere inside, and a voice spoke through the wood.
It was soft, and polite, and seemed to come from very far away.
“Please,” it said.
“Come in.”