The first thing he did in the morning was check the shrimp.
He sat on the edge of his bed in the grey light, with the farm hands still snoring. He took one cooked shrimp out of his inventory. He had put them away the afternoon before, straight off the fire.
It was hot.
Not warm. Hot. It burned his fingers, and steam rose off it in the cold loft. It smelled salty and sweet, as if it had come off the coals a minute ago.
He put it back. He took out another one from a different square. Hot. A third. Hot.
Time stops in there, he thought. It must. No shrimp stayed hot all night.
Maybe the inventory kept food forever. If it did, he could cook a pie in spring and eat it hot in winter, and no fish of his would stink.
He ate the third shrimp, because he'd taken it out and it would be rude not to. Then he waited until the town would be awake, and went to find out what the rest were worth.
* * *
Lumbridge started at the far end of the bridge, and it didn't stop.
Tam crossed in the middle of the morning, barefoot on the cold planks, with thirteen cooked shrimp in an inventory nobody could see. Below him the river ran brown and fast. Somewhere down there was the spot where Wren had dragged him out. He didn't look for it.
On the far side, the road ran straight into the town. It was a real town, a city almost, with streets of timber houses leaning over the road and stone houses for the people with money. Smoke hung over the roofs. Carts rattled past full of turnips and barrels. A woman was shouting about fish. Two dogs were fighting over something that might once have been a hat. Everything smelled of woodsmoke and bread.
Some of the people on the bridge knew him.
"That's the Fallow boy." He heard it twice before he was off the bridge. "The one the river took." An old woman with a basket of eggs stopped him in the road. She touched his sleeve with two fingers, as if checking he was solid, and said, "Saradomin's mercy, lad," before she went on her way.
I'm famous, he thought. For drowning. Great. Love that for me.
* * *
The general store stood north of the castle, in a busy street of shops. It was a low, deep building with a wide door and a sign of a sack and a scale. Inside, it smelled of rope and candle wax. There were shelves to the ceiling, crowded with pots, buckets and spades. At the back was a counter with a scale on it.
The shopkeeper was a bald man in a brown apron. He looked at Tam's bare feet first and his face second.
"Buying or selling?"
"Selling." Tam turned toward the shelves for a second, took a cooked shrimp out of his inventory, and put it on the counter. "Cooked shrimp. Fresh."
The shopkeeper picked it up and sniffed it. Then he looked at Tam.
"Still hot," he said.
"I walk fast."
"Two coins."
Two coins was the game's price. In the game, a shop paid you less than a thing was worth, and less again for every one it already had. Tam wanted to see if it worked like that here too.
"I've got a few more," he said.
He sold seven. The shopkeeper paid two coins for the first, and one coin each for the next six. When Tam put down an eighth, the man shook his head.
"Got plenty of shrimp now, lad. That one I'll take off your hands, but I won't pay for it."
Same as the game, Tam thought. "I'll keep it, thanks." He swept it off the counter and under his shirt, then into his inventory, quickly.
Eight small gold coins lay on the counter. He picked them up.
They stayed.
He stood there holding them for a moment longer than he needed to. They were thin and warm, like the coins in the jar under the loft floor, the ones that had slid through his fingers. But these stayed. Maybe it was because he had earned them. He had caught the shrimp with a net nobody gave him and cooked them on a fire anyone in the house could use. Then he had sold them himself.
Eight coins, he thought. Chat, I'm rich.
He put them in the inventory. They stacked together in a single square, a little pile of gold with the number 8 in the corner. In the game, coins showed up like that. Seeing it here made him laugh out loud, and the shopkeeper gave him a look.
"A hammer, please," said Tam.
The hammer cost one coin. The shopkeeper put it on the counter and Tam picked it up himself, and it stayed. It was a plain iron head on an ash handle, and it was heavier than it looked.
He looked at the knives on the shelf behind the counter. A card on the shelf said seven coins. He had seven coins left. He wanted one badly. With a knife he could cut up a rat, and see whether its bones gave him Prayer experience here.
But a knife would leave him nothing for a pickaxe. And there was something else he wanted to try first, up at the top of the castle.
Bank first, he decided. Then a pickaxe. Knife later.
* * *
The castle gates stood open by day. People went in and out: servants with baskets, a man leading a mule, two women arguing about a bill. A pair of guards leaned on their spears just inside, watching everybody and stopping nobody.
Open by day, Tam thought. Shut at night. He had found that out the hard way. By day, a farm boy who appeared out of thin air in this courtyard was one more face in the crowd. At night he was a trespasser in the Duke's house, and sooner or later somebody was going to mind. Unless the Duke ever says I can come and go, he thought. That seemed unlikely.
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One of the guards was big and sleepy, with a dented helmet. For a second Tam thought he was the guard from the other night. He wasn't. The castle seemed to have a lot of big, sleepy guards.
"Morning," the guard said, to nobody in particular.
"Morning," said Tam, and kept walking.
By daylight the courtyard was full of noise. The two fountains splashed, and a little boy was trying to climb the statue of the ancient hero while his mother pulled at his leg. Pigeons walked about on the steps.
A thin man in a servant's tunic was walking around the courtyard.
He walked steadily, at the same pace, close to the wall. He went past the first fountain, past the steps, past the second fountain, and around again. He had a narrow, anxious face, as if he expected something to jump out at him at any moment.
Hans, Tam thought. In the game, Hans walked around this courtyard all day. If you talked to him, he told you exactly how long you had been playing, to the minute. The game never said how he knew.
Hans came around the near fountain. As he passed Tam, he didn't slow down, and he didn't look at him.
"Three days, two hours and fourteen minutes," Hans said.
Tam turned. "Sorry. Since what?"
Hans kept walking. Over his shoulder, without breaking step, he said, "Since the river."
Then he was past the steps and going around again.
Tam stood very still by the fountain. The spray settled on his face, and he didn't wipe it off.
He counted back to the river. It fit, as near as he could tell.
How does he know that?
He thought about asking. Hans came around again, saw Tam looking at him, gave a small frightened jump, and walked faster.
Tam decided to ask another day.
* * *
The bank was at the top of the castle, just as it had been in the game. The way up was a narrow stone stair in the corner of the courtyard. At the bottom of the stair stood another guard. This one was wide awake.
"Business?"
"The bank," said Tam.
The guard looked him up and down.
"You've got business at the bank," he said. "You."
"I'm opening an account."
"How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
The guard thought about this. "Just old enough," he said. Then he stood aside. "Up the stair, and nowhere else. If I find you wandering in the Duke's rooms, you'll go out the window."
"Very fair," said Tam, and went up.
It was a long climb. At the top, he came out into a long room under the roof, full of light from tall windows. Along one wall ran a row of wooden booths, each with a brass plate set into the counter. Behind the booths stood the bankers.
They wore grey suits, all exactly alike. Two of them carried huge sacks on their backs. In the game, Tam had assumed the sacks had everybody's stuff in them. A merchant was leaning on one booth, counting out coins. A woman in a good cloak was signing something in a ledger.
The nearest banker was a thin young man with ink on his cuffs. He looked up as Tam came over.
"Good day, how may I help you?"
It was the game's exact line. Tam had heard it thousands of times. He nearly laughed.
"I'd like to open an account," he said.
"Certainly, sir. How old are you?"
"Eighteen," said Tam. "Everyone keeps asking."
"Then you're old enough. It's five coins to open, sir, and a small fee each month on whatever you keep with us." The banker opened a huge leather ledger on the counter and dipped a quill in his ink. "Name?"
"Tam Fallow."
The banker wrote it down. Or he tried to. The quill touched the page and the ink beaded up on the paper like water on a greasy plate. The beads rolled off the edge of the ledger and dripped onto the counter.
A magical force prevents you from banking this item!
Tam looked at the words. Item? he thought. I'm not an item.
The banker frowned at his quill. He wiped it, dipped it again, and wrote more firmly.
The ink beaded up again. The words came back.
"That's very odd," said the banker. He took a fresh quill and fresh ink and tried again.
The ledger slammed itself shut with a bang like a door in the wind. The banker snatched his fingers back just in time. The merchant at the next booth jumped and dropped his coins.
"Ah," said the banker faintly. "One moment, sir."
He went away. He came back with an older banker, a big man with grey side-whiskers and the biggest sack of all on his back. The older banker listened to the story with his hands folded and his face very patient.
"Nonsense," he said. "Ledgers don't shut themselves. Let's do it the proper way. Your opening fee, sir, if you please."
Tam took five coins out of his inventory, under the counter where nobody could see, and put them on the brass plate.
"Into the vault," said the older banker, and touched the edge of the plate.
The coins vanished. Tam felt a faint tug in the air.
Then the coins fell back onto the plate from nowhere, one after another. Clink. Clink. Clink. Clink. Clink.
A magical force prevents you from banking this item!
The older banker touched the plate again. The coins vanished and fell back, all five, and the words came up again.
"In thirty-one years," said the older banker slowly, "I have never seen the vault give anything back."
"Could we try a shrimp?" said Tam. "Just to see?"
They tried a shrimp. Tam brought it out from under his shirt, still hot, and laid it on the plate. The older banker sent it into the vault. It came straight back out, still hot, and landed on the brass with a small wet sound. The young banker made a noise that might have been a laugh, and turned it into a cough.
By now there was a little crowd. One of the other bankers had come over to watch, holding his own ledger to his chest.
Tam stood at the booth with his shrimp in front of him, and understood.
In the game, there had been a harder kind of ironman, the ultimate ironman, who could never put anything in a bank, and carried everything he owned in twenty-eight squares. Tam had played one on a second account, for his stream, for about a month. He had hated it. Chat had loved watching him suffer.
Not an ironman, he thought. Ultimate.
He wanted to know if there was any way around it at all.
"Could I buy more bank space, then?" he asked politely. "Just in case?"
The older banker turned his head very slowly and looked at him.
"Why?" he said. "You don't use the bank."
"Oh yeah," said Tam. "Never mind then."
He picked up his shrimp and his five coins, which stayed in his hand like the others. He thanked both bankers. The young one said, "Good day, sir," in a slightly strangled voice. The older one didn't say anything at all. He was opening and shutting the ledger, carefully.
Tam went back down the stair. The guard at the bottom watched him come.
"Well?" said the guard. "Rich now?"
"They wouldn't have me," said Tam.
The guard nodded, as if that was about what he'd expected.
* * *
Tam stood by the fountain. No bank, then. He had lived without one before. But then he could log off whenever he wanted.
Some of the best tricks on that account had needed him to die on purpose. An ultimate ironman who died dropped everything he carried in a heap where he fell. The heap would wait for him to come back for it, so a clever player could use his own grave as a cupboard. Tam wouldn't be trying that here.
Fine, he thought. I've done this before, badly. Never with one life.
He ate the shrimp. It was still hot.
* * *
Bob's Brilliant Axes was on the far side of town, in the south of Lumbridge. That was half an hour's walk through streets he didn't know. He got lost twice and asked the way once, from a girl selling ribbons.
The shop was small and dark, and it smelled of oil and steel. Axes hung on the walls, all shapes and sizes, their heads gleaming. Behind the counter stood a broad, red-faced man with forearms like hams and a leather apron covered in scratches.
"Bob," said Tam. It came out before he could stop it.
"That's me." Bob squinted at him. "Do I know you?"
"Everyone knows Bob."
Bob seemed to like this. "What can I do you for?"
"A bronze pickaxe, please."
"One coin." Bob took one down from a hook and laid it on the counter. It had a short, curved bronze head, pointed at one end and flat at the other, on a wooden handle. "You a miner, then?"
"Starting today."
"Down the swamp?" Bob shook his head. "Watch yourself down there. Rats. And goblins come down from the hills sometimes, bold as you like. Filthy things. Did you hear what they did to old Lozar? Burnt her house down around her ears, and now they're living in it. Living in it, like people." His face went redder. "If I had my way, every one of them would be..."
He went on for some time. Tam paid his coin, picked up the pickaxe and waited, nodding. In the game, Bob sold axes and fixed armour. In one of the later quests, a goblin girl had walked into his shop, and Bob had screamed at her to get out. Tam had always thought that was a joke.