Chapter 15. The Conversation

We went to the Guild office together. It was a mistake, but we had no better choice.

I understood what it would look like when a newly minted Bronze Seeker placed two high-quality sparks from the deep northern dungeon on Kess's counter. I might as well have set down a riddle he had been waiting months to solve. Yet we could not keep them. Sparks had to be sold while they were fresh, and hiding them would only create worse questions later.

Dorn accompanied me, walking slowly, favoring his bad leg more than usual. One arm rested in a sling he had retied himself to make the injury look less serious. On the way, he gave me a single instruction.

“I'll do the talking. You keep quiet and try to look less suspicious. Though with that face, I suppose we'll have to take what we can get.”

Kess sat behind his desk as though he had not moved since the evening he awarded me Bronze rank. He raised his head, saw us, and let his gaze travel first to Dorn's sling, then to my face, and finally to the pack over my shoulder.

Calculating. He was always calculating.

“Dorn. Adam.” He set down his pen. “You've brought a haul, I see. And an injury. Did the northern dungeon show its teeth?”

“It did,” Dorn grunted, lowering himself onto the bench. “Kess, pour me something warm and start counting. I don't intend to sit here all day. My shoulder aches.”

Without speaking, I untied the pack and poured our haul onto the dark wood. Nearly twenty sparks rolled across the cloth, larger and brighter than the cheap fragments I had carried from the upper tiers. It was a respectable haul on its own.

Then, a short distance from the rest, I placed the other two.

Kess stopped looking like a bored Magister.

His eyes swept across the ordinary tier sparks with the ease of a money changer assessing a handful of foreign coins. I could tell he was pleased; the catch was valuable, nothing like my previous copper earnings. But he did not linger over it. His attention passed through the entire scattering and fixed on the pair I had set apart.

At first, he simply stared, still and silent, while some invisible mechanism clicked into place behind his calm expression. Then he drew the lamp closer with great care and lifted the larger spark—the one taken from the dungeon's heart.

He held it near the flame, turned it, weighed it in his palm, and studied the light through it. He worked far more slowly than he ever had with my lesser finds. Then he set it down and examined the master's spark in the same careful silence.

Only after that did he look at me.

“Do you know what these are?” he asked quietly.

“Sparks,” I said. “Good ones.”

“Don't play games.” His voice remained level, but something firmer had entered it. “This is a heart spark. And this came from a dungeon master. Two from the same dungeon.” He placed them side by side on the cloth as carefully as though they were evidence rather than merchandise. “Do you know what that means? It means the dungeon has been cleared. Completely. Someone reached the fifth tier of the northern dungeon, defeated its master—a master I remember, because I once led people down there and did not bring all of them back—and destroyed the heart. That is what these mean.”

He leaned back and steepled his fingers.

“Now,” he said, “explain how the two of you managed it. A Bronze novice who has belonged to the Guild for barely six weeks. And a retired Seeker who, no offense, Dorn, can barely manage a level road. The two of you cleared a dungeon I would hesitate to entrust to five Silver-rank Seekers.”

The office became very quiet.

“What's there to explain?” Dorn said.

He spoke with the bored irritation of an old man trying to conceal how hard his heart was beating, and I understood that he was about to lie.

He was going to lie for me.

Calmly and naturally, the way a man learned to lie after twenty years of surviving difficult conversations along the Verge.

“We never planned to clear it,” Dorn continued, adjusting his bandaged arm with a grimace. “We went down a couple of tiers to chase lesser creatures and put the boy through his paces. Then there was a collapse. Old dungeon, unstable—you know how it is. It cut off the route above us. We had no choice but to go lower and search for another way. That's where we found the master. And…” He spread his good hand. “We got lucky. I kept it occupied as long as I could. That's how I hurt the shoulder. The boy found his chance. I showed him the narrow joint beneath its neck plate, and he landed the strike. Young, fast—fools and beginners have all the luck. Everything happened to align. Once in a lifetime, perhaps. It happened once for me in twenty years, which may be why I'm still here.”

It was a good lie. There was enough truth in it to hold the rest together: an unstable dungeon could collapse, Dorn could distract its master, and the vulnerable neck joint was real. All the deception had been hidden inside one word: lucky.

Everything depended on whether Kess believed that a novice had simply been fortunate.

Kess listened without interrupting. Then he shifted his gaze from Dorn to me, slowly and intently, and I knew he did not believe a word of it.

“Lucky,” he repeated. “Dorn, I've known you for twelve years. You're as cautious as an old fox. You don't ‘go down a couple of tiers’ in an unstable dungeon with a novice on your leash. You would avoid that hole entirely.” He leaned forward a fraction. “And he”—a nod toward me—“walked out of the Verge without a weapon or a scratch, despite not knowing what a dungeon was. In six weeks, he reached Bronze faster than anyone I've seen. And now he brings me a heart spark.” He paused. “That isn't luck. It has another name.”

I met his eyes in silence. Then, for the first time since taking the seat across from him, I spoke.

“What name would you give it, Magister?”

I asked calmly, without challenge, in the same measured voice I had once used across conference tables when I already knew the answer to a question and the man opposite me did not. Kess heard it. He was good at hearing things like that.

“I don't know,” he admitted. It was the first completely honest thing he had said since we entered. “That is the problem, Adam. I dislike not knowing. My trade is knowing slightly more about people than they choose to tell me—and taking my share from that knowledge.” He tapped the cloth beside the sparks. “With you, it isn't working. You're a locked box. I can respond in one of two ways.”

He raised one finger.

“I can talk. I can tell the right people—and I know several, not all of them in Greyfall—that a stranger from nowhere has appeared here and begun cracking deep dungeons like walnuts. Believe me, there are people who would find a man like that very interesting. They would come. They would look. They would ask their own questions, and they would be far less polite than mine.”

He raised a second finger.

“Or I can remain silent. Instead of selling pieces of your secret to strangers, I can invest in you myself. Better contracts. Protection from unnecessary attention. Faster promotion through the ranks—I can move quickly when I choose. In return, I take my fair share of what you bring me, along with something more important than money: your word that you are my Seeker. Greyfall's Seeker. No one else's.”

He lowered his hand.

“Think before you answer. This is not a threat, Adam. A threat leaves no choice. I am giving you one.”

He was offering me a choice while carefully pointing out that one of the doors opened over a cliff. That was Kess's kind of choice: agree to what I want, or I will make your life extremely difficult—but notice how honorable I am for warning you first.

I knew the method. I had used it myself in my old life, softly and politely, across tables where other people's futures were settled in clauses and signatures. I also knew how to answer it.

You did not attack the strongest part of the bargain. You made it unprofitable for the other man to break you.

“All right,” I said. “Let's calculate aloud, Magister, since you enjoy calculating. You can sell me once. I don't know what you would earn, but you would know better. After that, you would lose me and every spark I might bring you. Either I would run, or the people you sold me to would take me away, and they—not I—would profit from what I can do.”

I nudged the heart spark one finger's width closer to him.

“Or you can choose not to sell me. Then I bring you something like this every week. Not once, but steadily, for a long time. And every haul will be better than the one before it, because I'm growing. You've seen how quickly. Which is worth more, Kess? Selling the hen today, or keeping the eggs it lays?”

Something shifted in Kess's face. It was almost pleasure—the pleasure of a player who had sat down expecting to strip a novice of every coin and discovered that the novice understood the game just as well.

“A merchant's instinct,” he murmured. “I told you so on the first day.” He shook his head. “You aren't a forest man, Adam. Forest men don't bargain like that.” He gave me another long, appraising look, calculation mingling with something that resembled respect. “Very well. Keep laying your eggs.”

He settled back in his chair.

“This is our agreement: you are my Seeker, a Greyfall Seeker. I repeat nothing I hear, I give you the best contracts, and I turn away any eyes that don't need to be watching. I would raise your rank, but Bronze is the ceiling on the frontier. Silver and Gold are awarded in larger cities by the central Guild in Korvengard. When you are ready—and you will be—I will put in a word where it matters. My share will be fair. You can judge that for yourself. And here is the first proof of my goodwill.”

He counted out the payment for the entire haul, then added the price of the two rare sparks.

For the first time since arriving in this world, the small pile before me was not copper.

Silver. Several heavy, dull silver coins—worth more than all the copper I had earned in the previous weeks combined. I looked at them and saw no money. I saw a step: small, gray, and made of silver, part of the staircase that led upward and home.

“One last thing,” Kess said as I swept the coins into my purse. His voice had eased, as though the bargain had ended and an ordinary conversation could begin. “You may think Greyfall is the world. It isn't. Greyfall is a hole at the edge of the world, boy, forgive my bluntness. We see sparks like these once a year. There”—he nodded toward the wall and the direction in which I knew Korvengard lay—“they pay gold, not silver. And there are people interested in more than the sparks. Scholars. Wealthy patrons. Others as well.”

His voice dropped slightly. For the first time during the conversation, I heard something in it other than self-interest: caution, perhaps even unease.

“So don't rush away just yet. Under my wing, you'll attract less noise. The stronger you become, the more eyes will turn toward you when you step into the light. Learn that now.”

I filed the warning away in the most distant corner of my inner ledger. Others as well. Kess had not said who those others were. Perhaps he did not know. But he spoke of them like a man naming something he preferred to avoid, and that mattered more than anything else he had said in the past hour.

“I'll remember,” I said.

“See that you do.” He became his old self again: smooth, bored, unreadable. “Dorn will take you where you need to go. Listen to him. He's cautious, and with you, there is no such thing as too much caution.” His eyes were already returning to his papers. “When the shoulder heals, come back. I'll have a contract for you. A good one.”

We stepped into the gray afternoon. Dorn stopped outside the office, leaned his back against the wall, and released a breath as though he had been holding it for the entire conversation. He wiped his forehead with his good hand.

“You are a sly one,” he said, almost admiringly. “‘Sell the hen or keep the eggs.’ I thought I would have to talk us out of the trap while you sat there looking grim. Then you pinned him down with a single sentence. Where did you learn that?”

“The same place I learned everything else,” I said. “My old life. That was my trade.”

Dorn studied me for a moment.

“He's slippery,” he said at last, all amusement gone as he nodded toward the office door. “Kess. Not evil. Worse in his own way—self-interested. While you bring him golden eggs, he won't lay a finger on you. He'll protect you like his prize hen. But if the eggs stop, or selling you becomes more profitable, he'll do it without blinking. Remember that. Take his money, shelter beneath his wing, but never turn your back on him.”

“I won't,” I said.

Dorn was right, though not entirely. I needed Kess now: his market, his contracts, his silence, the protection he could offer my secret while I remained too weak to stand alone. I intended to use him exactly as he intended to use me. We were two men with hands at each other's throats, smiling because, for the moment, neither of us profited from tightening his grip.

I also kept thinking about Kess's final warning. The people in the wider world who were “interested in more than sparks.” He had mentioned them almost casually, as one more argument at the end of a negotiation. But in my cold, methodical mind, the words settled on their own line and began to glow like a spark in darkness.

Beyond Greyfall, there was more than Korvengard, its gold, and its scholars. Something else waited there. Something even the calculating, seemingly fearless Kess preferred not to draw near.

And the road home, I could already feel, led directly through it.

Dorn pushed away from the wall.

“Come on,” he muttered. “That silver is burning a hole in your purse. Brenna can feed you properly now, seeing as you finally have the coin to pay her.”

We crossed the square together: the old Seeker who had just lied to the Guild for me, and the man whose purse carried the sound of silver for the first time in this world. Smoke rose steadily above Greyfall's roofs. Beyond them and the palisade, the Verge stood dark. Somewhere in its depths waited the next dungeon, the next step, and the next small measure of progress toward home.

I walked toward them.

There was still no other road.