Chapter 9. The Seekers' Guild

I slept in the shed on a bed of hay beneath a single horse blanket, and I slept more deeply than I had in years. The body that preserved its own warmth kept me from freezing. For the first time since I had awakened in the forest, I simply ceased to be aware—no dreams, no trees, no white light.

It was almost happiness.

When morning came, I did not immediately remember where I was. For several seconds, I lay there expecting to hear Leo moving around in the living room.

Then I remembered.

And I got up.

I owed payment for the meal and shelter, so I treated the firewood as a proper job—partly from honesty, partly because I wanted to test myself with a simple, understandable task of the kind my old life had contained in abundance.

Brenna's axe was old and heavy, its blade chipped. I placed the first log on the block, judged the distance, and swung with half my strength.

The blade passed through the wood as though the oak were a boiled turnip and buried itself in the chopping block beneath it.

I froze.

I looked around.

The yard was empty.

After that, I worked carefully. I measured my strength the way I had measured it against the horned animal in the forest—exactly as much as a strong man would use and no more. The stack grew quickly, but not frighteningly so.

It became Rule Four. People already regarded me as a stranger and watched me closely. A man who split a chopping block without effort would attract an entirely different kind of attention.

I had to hide my strength until I understood how this place worked and whom I could trust.

For now, the answer was no one.

Brenna came onto the steps as I was finishing. She looked at the tall, orderly stack, then at me, then back at the stack.

“Half a day's work,” she said. “You finished before breakfast.”

“I don't like putting things off.”

She grunted. She did not believe me, of course, but she did not press. I was beginning to understand that this was her particular gift: she saw far more than she said and remained silent for exactly as long as necessary.

“The guildhall is open.” She nodded toward the square. “Go on, Adam. And try to survive your first week. I gave you good hay, and I'd hate to have wasted it.”

The Seekers' Guild stood across the square. It was a sturdier building than the others, low and broad, with an iron-bound door. Someone had carved a crude symbol into the sign above it, something halfway between a sword and a key.

Inside, the air smelled of ink, wax, and old blood.

The first thing I saw was a board covering an entire wall, buried beneath notices. I walked over and began to read.

The Guild traded in danger. Someone paid; the Guild sent people. Some notices offered work driving predators away from fields. Others demanded a fang or some other proof taken from a particular beast. Most belonged to a third category and repeated a word I did not know.

Dungeon.

Clear the dungeon near the old bridge.

Three needed for the dungeon at Wolf Hollow.

I stared at the word and understood that I did not understand it. I had been thrown into this world and given its language, but not the meaning behind that language. I knew the word. I did not know the world that had created it.

Each notice specified the rank required for the job. Ranks were measured in metals: Copper at the bottom, followed by Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Most of the notices were Copper. Only two were Silver, and both concerned the Verge.

I did not yet understand the value of local coin, but the numbers beneath those two contracts were several times larger than the rest. People paid that much only for places from which not everyone returned.

Reading the board, I noticed something more important than any of the contracts pinned to it.

Not one notice asked for a Seeker of a particular level. The Guild used no public measure like the numbers Analysis had shown me above creatures, plants, and the guard at the gate. Here, people were measured by rank, deeds, and reputation.

They could not see what I saw.

None of them could.

I could look at anyone in the room and read his strength as clearly as I read a beast in the forest, and he would never know. No one here possessed that ability. I did not yet understand how I would use the advantage, but I already knew that I would.

In my former life, I had earned my living by knowing a little more about the person across the table than he believed I did. Apparently, that talent had crossed into this world with me.

It had simply become much sharper.

“Newcomer.”

The voice was quiet and even. I turned.

A man sat behind a desk in the corner, someone I had failed to notice at first and who had apparently been studying me the entire time. He was thin and precise, dressed in clean clothes—which looked almost provocative amid the rough leather and mud of Greyfall. Around forty. Long fingers sorted through papers, an ink stain darkening one of them. His eyes were intelligent and cold, the eyes of a man accustomed to calculating another person's profit before that person could do it himself.

Quietly, I directed Analysis at him.

Kess · Level 16

The highest I had seen here. Not a trace of any special Mark. Ordinary, but the strongest ordinary person in the building.

“Magister Kess,” he introduced himself without rising. “I handle Guild business in Greyfall. And you must be the man from the Verge everyone has been talking about since dawn.” He put down his pen. “Sit. Tell me about yourself.”

“There is almost nothing to tell.” I sat opposite him. “I have no name that means anything here and no past you can verify. I want to join the Guild.”

The barest smile touched Kess's lips.

“Direct. I appreciate that. On the frontier, most people prefer walking in circles.” He steepled his fingers. “But understand my position. A man appears from nowhere, without a sponsor or history, having walked alive from a place few survive. I would pay handsomely to know how you managed it.”

He paused, leaving room for my answer.

I gave him none. I simply held his gaze.

“You don't wish to say.” He nodded, entirely unoffended. “Very well. The Guild is not a court, and we do not demand a past. We need people who enter the depths and return with something valuable. What they were before is a distant concern.”

He slid a blank sheet and a pen toward me.

“But I won't make you a hero on your first day either. I'll record you as you are: Unproven and unranked. You'll earn Copper if you return from your first dungeon and bring proof. If you don't return, then I was wrong about you, and there will be no one left to complain.”

That suited me. Unproven, unranked, unnoticed—there could be no better cover. I could rise quietly from the very bottom without revealing what I was until I became strong enough that hiding no longer mattered.

Before taking the pen, I asked the question that had troubled me since I first saw the board.

“Explain one thing to me, Magister. What is a dungeon?”

The pen stopped between his fingers.

Kess gave me a long, intent look. I understood that the question had revealed more about me than all my silence. No one born in this region could fail to know what a dungeon was. Such a person simply did not exist.

“So that is where you're from,” he said quietly.

He did not say where, and I did not understand what he meant. After a moment, he began to speak slowly, the way one might address a child or a foreigner from beyond the edge of the known world.

“A dungeon isn't a cave or an animal's den. It's a sickness in the body of the earth, a place where the world seems to have ruptured from within. Outside, it looks like a pit or a passage underground. Inside, everything is wrong: corridors that cannot exist and creatures no natural beast could produce.

“Every dungeon has a heart. While the heart beats, the dungeon grows and sometimes casts its creatures outside—onto roads, into fields, toward towns like this one. Seekers descend, fight their way to the heart, quench it, and carry away whatever of value they find inside. Then the hole becomes quiet.”

He nodded toward the board.

“That is how we make our living. It is also how we die out here. The Wild Verge has more of these wounds than anywhere else in the world, and no one knows why.”

My old habit of calculation asserted itself, and I asked the obvious question.

“If there are more dungeons here than anywhere else, why is Greyfall a struggling village instead of a wealthy city? People usually gather wherever there is valuable loot. This place is empty.”

Kess looked at me differently, as though I had unexpectedly said something worthwhile.

“You aren't a fool,” he said slowly. “You have a merchant's instinct. Your reasoning is sound, but the truth runs in the opposite direction. People do gather where dungeons promise profit. Just not here. Farther inland, near the great cities—even beneath Korvengard—the dungeons are tame, shallow, and thoroughly mapped. There, the risk is worth the coin, so people travel gladly and grow rich from it.”

He shook his head.

“The Verge isn't profit. The Verge is a wound. Dungeons are born here faster than we can silence them, and they take more lives than they pay for. People don't come here seeking wealth. They come because they have nowhere else to go: debtors, fugitives, the desperate, and stubborn fools like Brenna who care more about this land than their own safety.

“Greyfall isn't growing, lad. Greyfall is holding. And truthfully, it is losing a little more every year. People leave. They don't come.”

He smiled without humor.

“So welcome. You appear to be exactly the kind of man who has nowhere else to go.”

He picked up the pen again and held it out to me.

“Any more questions? Or will you ask which side of the sky the sun rises from?”

“No.”

I wrote my name on the sheet in foreign letters my hand formed without guidance.

Adam.

Kess looked at the signature, then at me. Something flashed through his cold eyes that no use of Analysis could read: calculation, appraisal, interest. He studied me the way I had once studied an undervalued deal.

“I won't send you into a dungeon alone,” he said, setting the sheet aside. “An untested beginner on his own isn't brave. He's a bad investment. The Guild dislikes losing its investments on the first day.”

He turned toward a door at the rear of the guildhall and raised his voice.

“Dorn! Come here. I have a newcomer for you.”

Something crashed beyond the door, followed by an irritated growl.

“Dorn will take a look at you,” Kess said, returning to his papers as though I no longer occupied his attention. “If he doesn't decide you're more trouble than you're worth, consider yourself fortunate.”