26 SEPTEMBER 3113 · DAY 288 OF THE SEVENTH EPOCH
00:00 — THE CANYON ROAD
They closed the road at midnight and put four hundred men on the perimeter, and not one of them would sit down again for eleven hours.
04:30 — FIVE HOURS BEFORE THE AUCTION
The carts came up the canyon road in the dark, and there were nineteen of them.
Crown outriders first. Then the carts, canvas roped down and sealed at every corner, each one with four men walking beside it and none of the four permitted to touch it. Then the lent fighters, riding in a long loose line behind, wearing the colors of six great houses.
Then, last, a hundred paces back and alone, one covered carriage with nobody in it.
It was impossible to tell what was in any one cart, or which of them held anything at all.
Malthane stood at the foot of the auction house with his hands behind his back and watched them come.
The building went up behind him.
The first cart reached the foot of the ramp and stopped, a clerk with a book stepped forward, and the whole thing began.
It took four hours.
The purple crystallized vault was brought down, loaded then moved to the twentieth floor, it was positioned in a chambre exactly behind the curtains of the giant auction room.
06:00 — THE GATE
At the gates, there were two of them at the entrance and they had been standing there since the first hour of light.
Corin Kleido was a hundred and four years old and looked twenty, which was what an Eldritch heart did for a man. He was built like a door himself — blond, messy-haired, small-eyed — with a Platinum heart in him and a clerk's ledger open on a stand at his left hand, and he had spent the morning being extremely, deliberately pleasant to people who were not used to being made to stop walking.
Ysolde Amanai was thirty-one, thin eyes, black short hair, a calm expression.
She was an Emerald-tier Eldritch holder. She stood on the other side of the gate with her hands loose.
Between them, four crown men, and behind those, twelve more, and beyond that the hall and the shafts that went up.
The line came up the ramp in carriages and went through one house at a time.
"House Verdan."
The totem came out on a gloved palm: silver, family-struck, a hound's head.
"Whenever you're ready, my lord."
"Salt before bread, and bread before blood."
"Thank you, my lord. Third row, east aisle."
Ysolde had already looked past him at the next carriage.
"House Ferrant."
A woman this time, older, with two sons and no patience. She presented her totem.
"We keep the western door, as we have in all the lore."
"Thank you, my lady."
They went through. Nineteen houses in the first hour, and it went like that.
07:20 — THE GATE
Then a carriage came up the ramp that had come a long way to be here, and a man got out of it who was about fifty, straight-backed, with gold threading his temples, and he handed a little girl down after him.
He came to the stand and took his glove off, and the totem lay flat on his palm: a small thing in old silver, a lamp with the flame struck sideways.
"Magath Lumian," Corin said. He found the line in the ledger. "Whenever you're ready, my lord."
"The first light was borrowed, the last will be repaid."
Nobody moved for a second. They looked at him.
So I lost the fifty-fifty, he thought.
"Ah—" The hand came up. "Ah. Forgive me. Returned. Of course it is returned."
Corin was already turning the ledger.
"It happens more than you'd think, my lord."
The woman had not looked at the totem. She had been looking at the man's face since the carriage door opened and she went on looking at it now.
"You stood at my sister's wedding," she said.
"I did."
It came without a pause of any kind, and the smile came with it, warm and finished.
"The rain held off until the vows and then came down like the sky had been waiting to be polite about it. Your mother wept through the whole of it. I remember thinking there was no dignity anywhere on that lawn and it was the best afternoon I'd had in a year."
"She did weep," Ysolde said.
The Lumian house had refused that invitation. Publicly, over water rights, in a letter her father had read out at table twice and laughed at both times. Magath Lumian had not stood on that lawn. Magath Lumian had not been inside forty miles of it.
The man's face did not change.
Something behind it did. It was very small and very fast, the way a man catches a glass before it goes off the edge of a table, and then he laughed at himself, quietly, and shook his head.
"Though I should be honest with you, my lady," he said. "I have heard that afternoon told so many times that I have begun to remember it as if I were standing in it. That is what age does. It furnishes the rooms you never entered." He put the glove back on. "I sent my regrets and my regrets were not accepted, as I recall, and I have been paying for it in other people's stories ever since."
It was a good answer.
It was a very good answer, and it had arrived in about two seconds, complete, with a joke on the end of it.
Ysolde Amanai had spent thirty-one years standing near people who were caught out in doorways. She had watched men lie to her father, to the crown, to the tax registry, to their own wives. They stammered. They apologized too much or too little. They got loud.
"Of course," she said.
The little girl at his side had not said anything at all.
She was dressed correctly and expensively, and she had her hand in his. She looked bored and sad.
Corin looked down at her and softened.
"Long morning," he said.
"Yes," the girl said.
"There's water inside, in the hall on the left. Get your father to sit you down before it starts." He stepped aside and made a small courteous gesture at the doors. "Twentieth floor, my lord. Enjoy the auction."
They went in.
Ysolde Amanai turned where she stood.
She watched them the whole way across the entrance hall, past the lamps, past the standing crown men, past the second stand and the second ledger, until the crowd took them.
At the far side of the hall the girl looked back at her.
Then they were gone, and the next totem was already out on the next palm, and a voice at her elbow was saying House Karrow, my lady, and Ysolde Amanai turned around and did her job.
But she knew something was wrong about the two who had just entered, a gut feeling she couldn't possibly prove.
08:30 — THE TWENTIETH FLOOR
Samuelle Bane stood at the rail of the twentieth-floor gallery and watched it go, Evelyn and Alphonse stood two paces behind him.
Malthane came up without hurrying.
"Ten," he said. "Today's ten, and nothing else. The other forty will come up that road one morning at a time, the day before they sell."
"Four more convoys, then.", Alphonse said.
"Four more." Malthane put a hand flat on the rail. "Nineteen carts. One closed road. One morning. Everything we sell today was locked behind that door."
He let that sit.
"And we will do it again four more times."
"So. Ten today. What about after its bought? If I was a thief, I would wait until the buyer gets his lot, and then steal it from him, would be much easier."
"It goes back in after being sold. A lot is bought in that hall, and it is carried back through that door immediately after with the buyer's name on the seal, and it stays there until the ninth day is finished. Then the crown delivers it. To the address written on the register, under crown escort, on a date the buyer will not be told in advance. And if a buyer wishes to carry his goods out himself, and believes he is capable of protecting them, then he may. The responsibility is entirely his."
"They'll hate that."
"They will hate it, and they agreed to it three months ago. It is written on the reverse of every totem the crown sent out, and not one house sent theirs back." He took his hand off the rail. "A man who has just paid a fortune for a thing is the easiest man on this continent to rob. He is proud, he is tired, he is carrying it himself, exposed."
Evelyn looked down the stairwell, and then up at the vault, and then at her father's back.
Nine days.
"The auction floor is twenty," Malthane said. "This one. The hall is through that wall. The vault is behind it."
"Now the assignments."
He turned to Samuelle.
"Fifteen through twenty. All of it. This floor, the hall, the three stations, the stairwells beneath it, the shafts, the galleries. Yours."
"Alone?", Samuelle asked.
"There will be forty men on those floors and every one of them will do what you tell them." Malthane's eyes did not move. "Six floors. Nothing reaches the top of this building without crossing five of them, and nothing comes back down without crossing them again. If anything on them moves that should not, you will know before it has finished moving."
Samuelle nodded, then looked away
"Evelyn, you will be in the room itself, you will be within reach of Judge Alphonse Graves for nine days, and you will not leave that room while he is in it, and you will not leave it while I am in it either."
She said nothing
"Say the second part back to me."
"I don't leave the room while you're in it."
"Good."
He went down the stairs.
Samuelle stayed at the rail for a while after that, looking at the purple door, and Evelyn stood where she was and watched him not move.
"He's right, you know," Samuelle said eventually. "About the arrangement. I've been in this building for six days looking for the flaw in it and there isn't one."
"Don’t talk to me.", Evelyn responded.
"Mm," Samuelle said.
The twentieth floor had been a hall and was now a machine, as the guests started coming in.
Four hundred chairs in a shallow bowl. The block at the front and the auctioneer's rail, and behind it a curtained bay where a sealed lot would come from. Behind the bay, a short corridor, an arch, two standing clerks, and forty paces further, the purple door. Clerks in the aisles with numbered paddles.
Alphonse Graves came in at the last, in the black, and took the seat that had been kept for him at the end of the third row, which was the worst seat in the room for watching an auction and the best one in it for watching a room.
Evelyn took the wall four feet behind his shoulder.
Suddenly, a man stood in front of them, accompanied by a little girl, Alphonse lifted his head.
"Hello!", Magath Lumian said.
"Hello, how can i help you sure."
Evelyn couldn't help but notice that the girl next to him had resonance around her body.
This little girl is cursed. She thought, as both of them crossed gazes and made eyes contact, the little girl immediately shifting her gaze elsewhere
"I was wondering, you are Alphonse graves right? The prodigy to be the next supreme judge?"
"Well, I'm honored by such praise... Yes, I am Alphonse Graves."
"Nice to meet you, I don't want to bother you of course, I just have one question."
"Yes, I am all ears."
"I can leave the auction room whenever i want right? Even if not all of the items are presented yet?"
"Of course, you may do as you please."
"Thank you."
"You are welcome."
Magath Lumain bowed, and then proceeded to take his seat.
Outside, the perimeter ran three hundred paces out from the building in every direction the canyon allowed.
Crown men on the near ring. Lent fighters on the outer, house colors mixed together and standing as far from each other as the spacing permitted. Then the crowd, held back at the rope since dawn, thousands of them, come to look at a building.
Leonard walked the line with a list.
"You," he said, to a young man in green who had drifted eleven feet from his post. "Back."
"There's nothing out here."
"Correct."
"So what am I…"
"You are standing on the outside," Leonard said,
The young man went back.
Leonard looked at the 20th floor, and couldn’t help but wonder, where does this bad feeling he has comes from, he felt, that something, was about to go terribly wrong.
08:45 — THE GATE
They came up the ramp on foot.
Nobody came up that ramp on foot. Every other name on the list arrived behind horses, and both Corin and Ysolde spent the morning watching carriage doors, and two young men walking up was weird.
"Good morning."
Zaid put the totem down flat on the wood. Silver, family-struck, a coiled thing with too many legs.
Corin's hand stopped over the ledger.
"Zyriam," he said.
Corin looked at the sealed paper that had come out from under the totem, and turned it over, and looked at the wax, looked at the signature under it, and did not say anything for a while.
"Whenever you're ready," he said.
"Iron before name, name before blood, and the road behind us is closed."
Corin let out a breath and set the paper down.
"Well," he said. "That's it, word for word." He was already reaching for the stamp.
"Twentieth floor, my lord, and welcome. And your..."
"You are not going in!", Ysolde Amanai had not spoken since they came up the ramp, and right now, she was holding the letter open in her hand.