Chapter 12. The Price

We returned to the guildhall near evening. Dorn brought me to the door, muttered something about reporting properly and avoiding heroics, then limped away toward the Grey Griffin. I understood that he was finished with me for the day and went inside alone.

Kess sat behind the same desk as though he had not moved since morning. He looked up and saw me. For an instant, surprise crossed his face before disappearing.

He had not expected me to return.

“Well,” he said quietly, setting down his pen. “Alive. And walking under your own power.” He leaned back and studied me. “Dorn already came by. He said exactly three words: Fit. Train him. From Dorn, that's a song of praise. He doesn't speak about people that way.”

Kess narrowed his eyes slightly.

“What did you do to impress him, forest man?”

“I stayed alive,” I said. “I think that's enough for Dorn.”

The corner of his mouth moved.

“I suspect it is. Show me what you brought.”

I removed the bag from my shoulder and poured the sparks onto his desk. About fifteen dull gray stones rolled across the dark wood, each holding a weak glimmer of light.

Kess pulled the lamp closer.

He changed.

The bored administrator vanished. In his place, an appraiser bent over the stones. He took them one at a time, held them near the light, turned and weighed them in his palm, and narrowed his eyes at several. His fingers moved quickly and confidently, like those of a money changer who had spent a lifetime handling other people's gold.

I watched and understood that he truly was good. He read the sparks almost as accurately as I did, not through glowing lines but through experience, sight, and touch.

Almost.

I saw more than shine and weight. From the doorway, I had directed Analysis toward the scattered stones. Thirteen carried the designation Quality: Low. Above two, the System showed Quality: Below Average, one grade better than the others.

I did not know their price in copper yet. But I knew with certainty that those two were worth more than the other thirteen.

I knew it more reliably than Kess did.

“Fifteen sparks, all from the first tier,” he said at last, gathering them into one pile. “Small goods. Dim and cheap.”

He named a single price for all fifteen and began sliding coins toward me as though every stone were identical. It was not theft. It was a test: would an untested beginner notice, or accept the first number offered?

I did not argue over the price because I genuinely did not know the market. I said something else.

“Thirteen are dim. I agree. These two aren't. They're one grade better and shouldn't be valued with the rest. You know how much extra they're worth, Magister. But count them separately.”

I did not explain how I knew. I spoke calmly, as if the distinction were obvious, the way I had once spoken across a table to someone who believed he understood a deal better than I did.

Kess went still.

Then he separated the two sparks, raised them to the lamp again, and looked at me with his boredom entirely gone.

“You're right,” he said softly. “These two are better. I mixed them with the dim ones on purpose, to see whether you had any sense. Most beginners would have swallowed the price without blinking.” He placed the better stones in a separate pile. “A forest man who doesn't know what a dungeon is or what a spark costs, yet judges quality at a glance. You're an interesting arrangement.”

He counted the coins again, properly this time, paying separately for the dim sparks and the two better ones. Then he pushed the small pile across the desk.

I gathered the coins and examined the money of this world for the first time.

They were copper pieces, dark and uneven, heavier than they appeared. One side bore a roughly stamped mark that might have been a tower or an ear of grain. Plain working money.

I held them in my palm and felt something strange. In my former life, money had become invisible: numbers on a screen, a light touch of a card. I had not held so many coins at once in years. Now a handful of dark metal rested in my palm, earned by entering a dungeon and recovering sparks from its creatures.

It was every coin I possessed in an entire world.

“Explain the currency to me, Magister,” I said. “If I'm going to earn it, I need to understand it.”

Kess gave me the same newly attentive look, but he answered readily. He clearly respected money and enjoyed discussing it.

“Simple. You'll remember after hearing it once. Three coins. Copper is what you have there. The frontier lives on copper. A bowl of stew or a bed in the hay costs one or two copper pieces. Next comes silver. One silver piece equals one hundred copper pieces.”

He raised a finger.

“Silver is already uncommon here. A good sword costs a couple of silver pieces. A Seeker's equipment—leather, iron, supplies—several more. A person who carries silver on the frontier has some standing.”

He paused, amusement entering his voice.

“Above silver is gold. One gold piece equals one hundred silver pieces. Ten thousand copper pieces, if that makes the scale clearer.”

I converted the number in my head and gave a quiet grunt.

Ten thousand.

“Exactly,” Kess said. “Gold is nearly absent from the frontier. I've been here five years and could count the gold coins I've seen on my fingers. That's Korvengard money. Capital money. Noble money. A family here could live for a year or longer on one gold. An ordinary Seeker may never hold one.”

He nodded toward my handful.

“So there is the whole ladder, forest man. Copper at the bottom, silver in the middle, gold at the top—and you won't see much of the last for a long time.”

I listened and calculated. The entire bag that had weighed down my shoulder was worth one fifth of a silver piece—one five-hundredth of a single gold coin, the kind of money people here could go years without seeing.

Somewhere at the end of an unimaginably distant road stood my home.

I did not allow the thought to crush me. I placed it beside the others and poured the copper into a small purse. A journey of ten thousand steps still began with one.

Today I had taken one.

That was more than yesterday.

“One more thing.” Kess opened a drawer. “You completed your first contract and returned alive. That means you are no longer Unproven.”

He set a small badge of dark copper on the desk. It bore the same rough emblem as the coins and had a hole for a cord.

“Copper rank. The lowest. Wear it where people can see it. At gates, on roads, in any Guild office, this is your pass and your name. Above Copper comes Bronze, then Silver, then Gold. The higher your rank, the more valuable the contracts you may accept and the fewer questions guards will ask.”

He slid the badge toward me.

“From today onward, you are a Seeker, Adam. The newest and lowest of them, but a Seeker.”

“How do I rise?” I asked.

I needed to know not how to stand on the lowest step, but how to leave it behind.

“Deeds,” Kess said. “Only deeds. The Guild doesn't count words. Take contracts at your rank. Enter dungeons. Bring back sparks. Return alive, and make certain witnesses and records exist. Accumulate enough successful descents, reach stronger creatures, begin carrying richer sparks, and we'll raise you a step.

“Not from kindness. A higher rank lets you take more expensive contracts, and the Guild earns more from expensive contracts.” He smiled. “So our interests align, Seeker. The higher you climb, the better I eat.”

“And Silver?”

“Silver is more than entering holes and collecting scraps. Silver Seekers defeat masters and close entire dungeons. Greyfall has two. We had three before spring.” He began turning back toward his papers. “I've never met a Gold Seeker. There may not be one anywhere on the frontier. Gold rank, like gold coin, is a luxury for richer places.”

I picked up the badge. The copper felt warm, light, and nearly worthless in itself. Still, I held it longer than it deserved.

It was the first object in this world that told people who I was. Not the stranger from the forest. Not the mystery. Not the Anomaly.

A Seeker.

A person with a place and a name among other people, even if that place was on the lowest step.

“Dorn will continue guiding you,” Kess added, already reaching for his pen as though I had stopped occupying his attention. I knew I had not. He watched from the corner of his eye. The interest had become calculation, stronger now than when he first saw me that morning. He was deciding something about me, adding figures together.

“Listen to him. He knows his work. And you...” Kess hesitated. “I think you'll rise faster than most. Something tells me so.”

I did not answer, but I remembered the words and the look. A man who studied you across a pile of money was dangerous in direct proportion to how useful you were to him.

I did not yet know how I might be useful to Kess.

I intended to learn before he did.

Blue twilight had settled by the time I reached the Grey Griffin.

Brenna was working behind the counter. When she saw me in the doorway, she stopped for the briefest moment, and I caught something on her hard face that she surely had not intended to reveal.

Relief.

She had not expected me back either. Not every beginner returned from a first dungeon.

“Alive,” was all she said. “And wearing a badge, I see.”

“Wearing a badge,” I confirmed.

“Sit down, then, Seeker.” She nodded toward a table beside the hearth and carried a bowl there without asking. “The house feeds you after your first descent. Once. After this, you pay like everyone else.”

I sat beside the fire. When the hot stew appeared before me, my first copper rested in my purse, and the copper badge hung against my chest, the exhaustion of a day as long as a year finally settled over me: the shirt folded at the bottom of my pack, the dungeon, the heartbeat below, the dim sparks, the foreign coins.

I ate slowly and watched the fire. Brenna left me alone, and for that I was more grateful than for the food.

I returned to the same hay in the shed. There in the darkness, alone, I did what I had postponed all evening.

I directed Analysis at myself as I had on the first night beneath two moons.

Adam
Level: 5
Origin: —
Class: Undetermined
Mark: Anomaly

Five.

On the first night, it had been two. Every victory in the forest and dungeon had added its mark to the System's invisible record, and I had grown. The attributes listed below had risen as well. Strength. Endurance. Speed. Each had increased slightly, and beside each remained the small symbol of the Anomaly, as though the System still could not decide whether it was measuring me by the correct scale.

I closed and opened my fist. The body responded a little more readily and a little faster than the day before. The change was small, but I felt it like a bowstring drawn tighter beneath my fingers.

Then a new line unfolded beneath the attributes.

Recognized Technique: Internal Reinforcement I
Function: channeling internal energy into physical performance
Distribution: unstable
Further control unavailable

I read the message twice.

The System had not given me a new ability. It had named something I was already doing without understanding it. Every time I loosened the leash, the same hidden current passed through muscle, bone, breath, and reflex. Until now, I had released it as a single crude surge and allowed this body to decide where it went.

The word distribution changed that.

Strength. Endurance. Speed. They were not merely numbers that rose together. They were possible destinations for the same force. I could not choose among them yet—the System had stated that clearly—but choice existed. Control existed somewhere beyond the limit I had reached.

And once again, the mark beside the name mattered.

Internal Reinforcement I.

The first stage. Not the last.

Level Five.

A ridiculous number beside Dorn's thirty-four. Yet I had kept this body on a short leash all day so I would not reveal what it could do, and I knew the System's measure for me was not the same measure it used for others.

I did not yet understand how different it was.

I understood the important part.

Today, I was slightly stronger than yesterday.

It was not much. One fifth of a silver coin. Level Five. A copper badge on a cord. A cheap, narrow step.

But the road to the strength that would one day break through the wall between me and home consisted entirely of narrow steps like these, each one counted and paid for in copper. I had no others.

These would have to do.

I turned the ring on my finger, closed my eyes, and for the first time since arriving in this world, slept not like a hunted animal but like a man with work waiting in the morning.

Tomorrow, I would descend again.