"Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." — Publilius Syrus
Caelmont had two faces, and the road between them took forty minutes on foot.
The upper city was still sleeping off the festival, with Vance’s gold-leaf banners hanging slack in the morning wind and drifts of celebration paper banked against the fountains like dirty snow.
Joel walked through it with a hood up and the wrapped halberd slung across his back like salvage, and nobody looked at him twice, because a city that had spent the night toasting an A-rank had no attention left over for the boy it had buried.
Below the aqueduct line, the light changed. The Rustward District sat against the outer wall itself, in the Spire’s permanent shadow, and it had grown the way slums grow, without plan and without apology.
Smog from the salvage foundries hung in a low brown ceiling over the whole district, and the streets beneath it were mud and cinder, threaded with rope bridges and sagging power lines that bled pale light out of Rift-Core lamps running on stolen charge.
Everything in the Rustward had come from a wagon or a corpse.
It was the city’s underbelly, where people fenced whatever the city could not openly claim.
The economy of the whole arrangement sat on two pillars that every child learned alongside their letters.
Rift-Cores were the blood of the economy, dropped by Spire monsters and harvested for the energy inside them, and they lit the streets, fed the foundries, and filled the tribute wagons that the Inner Cities demanded every quarter.
Spire-Credits were the garrison-issued currency that the cores were priced in, and the honest Exchange near the plaza bought cores from licensed hunters at fixed rates and asked no questions about anything stamped with a seal.
Everything that was unlicensed, unclaimed, or unspeakable came down the hill instead, and the Rustward paid worse and asked nothing at all, which was exactly the sort of market a dead boy with a hidden Stratum clear needed.
Joel had walked the district only in the borrowed memories of the old Joel. Every black economy funnels toward its most paranoid accountant, and the memories all pointed at the same name.
Silas operated out of a scrapyard at the bottom of a cinder slope, hidden behind walls of stacked Crawler chitin and gutted cargo wagons.
His shop had no sign.
The lack of one was the sign.
A voice-pipe of rusted brass stuck out of the wall beside a half-shuttered door, and Joel had barely raised his knuckles to it when the pipe spoke in a voice like dry paper being torn very slowly.
"No steel drawn. No names given. No refunds issued. State your business and keep your face out of my light."
"Core sale," Joel said, keeping his voice low and bored. "One item of grade, plus a bulk lot."
The shutter slid across, and a milky lens tracked him through the gap for a long moment, and then the door unlocked itself in three separate stages from somewhere inside.
The entry corridor bent twice before it reached the shop floor, so that no one standing at the door could ever see the room, and a chain clinked in the dark as Joel passed through the second bend.
The chain was attached to an Ash-Crawler.
It sat in the corner like a dog, a dog-sized insectoid with black chitin and pearl-buried eyes, and it wore a studded leather collar, and it shuffled forward on clicking legs and begged at him with waving antennae for scraps it could smell on his boots.
Joel looked down at it and experienced a genuinely complicated professional moment, because the last sixty-nine members of this creature’s family had died on his spear in a gorge, and this one was employed as a doorbell.
"Down, Duchess," rasped the voice from the shop, and the Crawler settled back onto its chain with an injured clatter.
Silas himself stood behind a counter of riveted iron plate, and the description filed itself into Joel’s ledger automatically.
He was a knuckle-sized man somewhere past sixty, built like dried kindling and permanently stooped from a lifetime of leaning over counters, and he wore a heavy lead-lined apron over a shirt that had once been white.
His hands were the resume, because they were crosshatched with pale burn scars from decades of testing cores bare-handed, and he wore fingerless gloves with the fingers cut off professionally rather than worn through.
One of his eyes was clouded white, the souvenir of a core that had flashed on him at some point in his career, and the other was green and enormous behind a brass magnifier monocle that was clearly a work artifact, because Joel could feel it humming faintly from the doorway.
A ledger hung from his belt on a chain, a mustache the color of old nicotine sat under his nose like a tired paintbrush, and the entire man smelled of solder and vinegar and the specific distrust of someone who had survived the Rustward by assuming every visitor was a knife.
"No names," Silas said again, by way of greeting. "Hoods are welcome, steel stays wrapped, and if you waste my morning I charge by the minute. Show me the item."
Joel set the satchel on the iron counter and lifted out the core.
It was the size of two stacked fists, dense and dark as cooled slag, and it had come out of the Chieftain’s chest cavity at the end of the harvest, when everything else in the lair had been priced and this one item had simply refused the standard labels.
The system had graded it for him on the walk down, and the grading had been the reason for the whole trip.
[Item Discovered]
Name: Rift-Core (Boss-Grade, Kinetic-Saturated)
Origin: Gore-Ape Chieftain (Lv. 15, Stratum Boss)
Grade: Rare
Effect: a dense kinetic lattice holding decades of absorbed impact energy. High-value feedstock for weaponsmithing and military contracts.
[System Note: the landlord’s heart, in convenient carrying form.]
Silas put his monocle over it, and Joel watched the green eye travel the core’s surface and stop, because the surface was not smooth.
It was crosshatched, layered in fine growth rings like the grain of old wood, and a fence who had spent forty years reading cores knew what the rings of a kinetic-type boss meant, because every ring was a year of impacts absorbed and stored.
"Runner’s price," Silas said, and his voice did not change at all, which was the tell. "Six hundred."
"You looked at it through the glass before you priced it, so let us both pretend the number was aimed at somebody else’s core," Joel said flatly, and he saw the monocle twitch. "Drop it on your counter. Flat, from wrist height."
"Why would I..."
"Because a saturated kinetic core rings true when it lands, and a cracked or drained one thuds, and you already know that, because you invented the test," Joel said. "Ring it, and then quote me again."
Silas looked at him for a moment with his one good enormous eye, and then he picked up the core and dropped it flat from wrist height onto the iron counter.
The core did not thud. It struck the plate and rang, a single clean note in the exact harmonic family as the Spire’s own deep voice, and the core itself hopped a clear handspan back off the counter from its own stored impact, and Silas’s ledgers, his lamps, and every loose item in the shop sang faintly in sympathy with it.
The old fence stood in the middle of that small chorus, and his mustache moved without producing a sentence.
"That ring is saturation, and saturation is grade," Joel said, while the note died slowly out of the counter.
"Thirty years of growth rings, no extraction cracks, because the kill was clean and the core came out whole, which your buyers care about, because a cracked lattice bleeds its memory during forging.
Silas looked at the core, and then at the hooded boy, and something behind his ruined eye performed a full recalculation.
"The quota is garrison business, not mine," he said at last, which was not a denial of anything. "Twelve hundred, and you leave the fragments in the bag as a courtesy."
"The fragments are a separate lot with a separate price, because you will sell them by weight to the foundry men before lunch," Joel said.
"Two thousand eight hundred for the core. Twenty-six each for the seven Standards, which is above the Exchange rate and your own black rate, and I am pricing them kindly because I want the walk over with.
One credit apiece for the forty-six fragments, which is robbery in your favor, and you may have them anyway. That is my invoice, and it is honestly drawn."
"Twenty-four hundred for the core, and I keep my morning."
"Twenty-eight, and you keep your reputation, which is the only reason a boy with no name would climb your hill," Joel said.
"The next seller who brings you a rung core that rings like that will not be able to prove the quota arithmetic, and you will lowball him too, and he will take it, because most of your customers are desperate.
I am not desperate. I am informed, and there is a difference, and you have been in this business long enough to prefer the difference."
The silence stretched, and Duchess clicked her legs in it.
"Twenty-six hundred," Silas said, "and you carry your own cores out of the district, because my runners are watched."
"Agreed," Joel said, and he watched sixty years of professional paranoia count out the sum in physical credit chits, bite four of them at random for the paranoia’s sake, and slide the stack across the iron in a lead box that had clearly been built for exactly this transaction.
The settlement came to 2,825 credits in total, and Joel stood at the counter stacking the chit boxes in his satchel while Silas recorded the morning in his chained ledger, and the sum sat in his mind with a comfortable weight, because it was roughly three years of a garrison guard’s wages, and he had earned it in a week of being eaten.
[Ding!]
[Transaction logged. Current balance: 2,825 Spire-Credits.]
[System Note: the house is now a paying customer.]
It was the crate beside the counter that ended the morning properly, a wooden box of unsellable junk shoved against the wall, and Joel’s eye had been drifting to it since the negotiation ended, because a pharmacist never leaves a pharmacy without reading the clearance shelf.
It held the shop’s dead stock, watered-down cultivation manuals with broken bindings, a cracked mana compass, and a thin stack of skillbooks that had not moved in years.
"How much for the books?" Joel asked.
"Skillbooks that did not sell are skillbooks that do not work," Silas rasped, not looking up from his ledger. "Two credits apiece, take the whole stack and do me a kindness."
Joel leafed through them one at a time, and most of them were exactly what the crate promised, until the third-from-bottom stopped his hand entirely.
It was a thin, grey-bound pamphlet of cheap paper, stamped with a faded F-rank seal, and the title on the cover was [Bind Corpse].
He opened it, and the system read it over his shoulder before he had finished the first page.
[Item Discovered]
Name: Skill Book ’Bind Corpse’
Grade: F (Trash)
Effect: teaches the necromantic binding of one weakened corpse. Success rate: 1%. Bound entity: one weak undead maximum. Duration: minutes.
[System Note: even the library is embarrassed by this one.]
’A one percent success rate,’ Joel thought, standing in the smog light of the most paranoid shop in Caelmont, with three years of wages in his satchel and an Epic chassis folded under a black band on his wrist. ’Sold for two credits, in a junk crate, at the bottom of the world.’
He had spent a week watching the Wheel turn garbage into currency, and the Wheel had never once asked what the garbage cost.
"Two credits," Joel said aloud, and he put the pamphlet in his satchel with the money.