"This paper says that a Zyriam is bringing an outsider with him, and its asking us to let them both in, as if your house had the authority to make such a decision."
Corin's hand stopped a second time. He looked at the ledger, at the Zyriam line, then looked at both of them.
"Now that she says it, you don't look like you come from the south", he said while looking at Adam.
"...No," he said. "I don't."
"He's with me," Zaid said.
"The seat is a Zyriam seat. It admits House Zyriam." Ysolde had come around the stand and was standing directly in front of Adam now. "What house are you?"
"None."
"Then who names you?"
"I don't know."
"Then I have nothing to write down." She said it without any weight on it at all. "That is the whole of it. There is no insult in it and there is nothing behind it. There is a book, and there are two seats written on that line, and both of them are Zyriam's."
"So one of them is spare."
"One of them will be empty."
"Then…"
"Then it will be an empty Zyriam seat. My lord, the crown did not send out four hundred seats. It sent them to houses. A seat is not a coin your lord keeps in a drawer and hands to whoever amuses him. It is the house's own place in that room. The house may stand in it. Nobody else may, and the house cannot give that away, because it was never the house's to give."
"Its own party…"
"Its own. Its blood, its sworn men, its retainers, people written into the crown's book as belonging to House Zyriam, and answerable to it, and answered for by it." She looked at Zaid for the first time. "If he were yours, I would write him in now and you would both walk through that door, and I would not ask you another question all week."
It went on a little too long.
Adam watched him not answer. Watched him look at the ledger, and at the sealed paper in his hand with his father's wax on it, and work out exactly what it would cost, and get as far as opening his mouth.
He's my—
"No," Adam said.
Zaid's head came round.
"Adam—"
"No." He picked the sealed paper up off the stand and put it back in Zaid's hand, and closed his fingers over it. "We're not doing that."
They went twenty paces back down the ramp, out of the line, and stood at the rail where the canyon dropped away.
"I'm not going in without you."
"Yes, you are."
"I came here for…"
"You came here for your weapon." Adam had already turned to look at the building. "Listen. Nobody knows what's inside this place. There's no catalogue, no list, no crier, no window. Fifty things go in the top of it and in nine days every single one of them will be gone. Scattered. Sold to a house on the other side of a continent, in a crate, at night."
"I know what it is."
"But every one of them leaves that room attached to a name." Adam turned around. "That's the whole thing. That's the only thing they can't hide, and you have to be inside to see who buys your weapon. The lot is sold to the man who bid, and the man who bid has a house, and a house has an address."
Zaid was quiet.
"I can't get in," Adam said. "You're already in. If you walk down this ramp with me, we learn nothing, and in nine days your family's treasure is on a cart to somewhere neither of us will ever find, and I won't get within a hundred miles of a cursed object for a while. If you go in, we know who has it. That's not nothing. That's everything."
"And you?"
"I'll be out here."
"Doing what?"
"Waiting."
Zaid looked at the sealed paper in his hand.
He had not thought about the shape of it until this exact moment on this exact ramp, and he understood, standing there, that to get his own weapon back he was going to have to sit in a chair his father had paid for, among his father's peers, holding his father's seal in his coat like a good son.
"Zaid."
"I heard you." He put the paper away. "Where will you be."
Adam pointed, and Zaid followed his arm.
Across the road, past the rope and the crowd, there was a stone terrace that had been somebody's shopfront before the crown closed the district, and it sat high enough to see the ramp, the doors, the whole face of the tower.
"I'm counting on you," Adam said.
He went back up the ramp alone, Zaid turned to look back once at Adam who waved at him. Corin Kleido stamped the line, Ysolde Amanai watched him all the way across the entrance hall, and then went back to the next totem on the next palm.
The terrace was cold and it faced north and there was nothing on it but a broken frame.
Adam sat down against the wall with his knees up and looked at the building.
He could see the outer ring of the perimeter and about half of the near one.
He pulled his coat around him and settled in, and after a while, he couldn't help but start thinking how he could get inside.
The twentieth floor.
Zaid had never in his life been in a room with this much money in it, and he had grown up in a house that kept Eldritch hearts the way other houses kept land.
Four hundred chairs in a shallow bowl, filled. The block at the front under a light that came from nowhere he could identify. A rail, a curtained bay, clerks in the aisles with numbered paddles, runners on the stairs, and along the walls at intervals men in crown black who had not moved since he came in.
He took a seat fifteen rows back.
Around him, the continent.
Lord Verdan was three rows from the front and had brought four people with him and was talking to none of them. Broad, red-faced, well-dressed. Paddle twelve. He had the paddle in his hand already and the lots had not started.
House Ferrant, the older woman from the gate, with two sons on either side of her like bookends. Paddle thirty. She had put her paddle on her lap, face down, and folded her hands on top of it.
Tariq Thagirion sat two seats from the end of his own house's row.
There was a man in the black of the crown judiciary at the end of the third row, in the worst seat in the room for watching an auction, who had not looked at the block once since he sat down, and that man was Alphonse Graves.
Evelyn standing against the wall four feet behind him.
And Malthane stood at the side of the room with his hands behind his back, facing the four hundred, and he did not look at the block either.
Two rows over and eleven seats along there was a gap in the bowl where nobody was sitting, and nobody would sit all day.
Somewhere in the middle of the hall a grey-templed man in expensive travelling robes was settling into his seat. There was a small girl beside him in a good coat. She had not looked at the block either. She was looking at the room, slowly, one section at a time.
It was the pair Ysolde had felt wrong about at the door — the man, and the small girl beside him, Magath Lumian.
09:30 — THE AUCTION FLOOR
The bell rang the hour.
The auctioneer came out from behind the curtain and stood at the rail and let the room quiet itself, which it did, in about four seconds.
He was thin, sixty, and entirely unremarkable until he spoke.
"My lords and ladies. My name is Venn. For the next five selling days I have the honor of standing between you and the finest collection of objects assembled on this continent in living memory, and I intend to enjoy every minute of it."
A little laughter. He let it go past him.
"The rules, once, and then never again. Bids are taken by paddle and I will call the number, never the name. The increment is announced with each lot and I will not accept a bid beneath it, no matter how charming the gentleman offering it." More laughter, warmer. "Each lot carries a reserve which I will not disclose. If the bidding does not reach it, the lot is withdrawn and returned to the vault unsold, and I will be very sorry about it and there will be nothing whatever I can do."
He set his hand on the rail.
"You will hear me say fair warning. When you hear it, you have the length of my next breath. Then the hammer, and it is finished, and I will not reopen a lot for any lord living."
He looked out over the four hundred and smiled without any warmth in it at all.
"Lot one."
LOT ONE
The curtain went back and two men carried out a case, and inside the case, on black cloth, was a heart.
It was the size of a bull's head and it did not look like a heart. It looked like something quarried. Six lobes instead of four, laid in a ring, the whole of it shelled over in overlapping plates the colour of old horn, and where the plates met the surface was not smooth but ridged, like the underside of a tortoise.
"The heart of a tarasque," Venn said. "Platinum Tier, graded by the Utopian standard, papers with the crown."
He walked the case slowly along the front of the block so that the first six rows could see it.
"For those of you who did not hear this name before. Six legs. The head of a lion. The tail of a serpent. And across its back a shell that the histories agree could not be broken." He turned. "They put an army against it. They put fire against it. They put a siege engine against it, which I always think shows a certain lack of imagination. Nothing. Not one plate. In the end a single unarmed woman walked out to it and spoke to it, and it lay down, and it followed her back into the town like a dog, and the townspeople killed it while it was calm."
The room had gone quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when they smell value.
"What it gives," Venn said, "is exactly what you would expect and no more. The bearer becomes very difficult to hurt. Not resistant. Difficult. And of course, you all know, as every eldritch heart does, it will give you immortality." He set the case down.
"And the woman who brought it to the village?"
Verdan said it, loudly, from the third row, and half the room turned.
"My lord?"
"You told us the story, tell the rest of it. Can it be talked to."
Venn did not blink.
"The histories say it was calmed. The crown's assessors say they found nothing in the heart that answers to a voice." He picked up his gavel. "I will say only this, my lord. You are all here today because somebody in this room believes the old stories are worth money."
That got the biggest laugh of the morning.
"Opening at ten thousand sovereigns. The increment is five hundred."
Paddle twelve went up before Venn had finished the sentence.
"Ten thousand from twelve. Thank you, my lord.", Venn said after looking at it.
It ran fast at first, the way early bidding does. Twelve, then fifty-five, then thirty, then twelve again, four bidders and then three and then two, and by twenty-two thousand it was Verdan against a paddle in the back that Zaid could not see, and by twenty-five thousand, the back paddle stopped.
"Twenty-five thousand, with twelve. Fair warn—"
"Twenty-five thousand five hundred."
The room turned.
It was the grey-templed man in the middle of the hall, The Lumian himself. He had raised his paddle about as high as a man could.
"Twenty-five thousand five hundred," Venn said. "Forty-one bids."
"Twenty-six thousand," said Verdan, without turning round.
"Twenty-six thousand five hundred," said the man.
"Twenty-seven thousand."
"Twenty-seven thousand five hundred."
It went like that for a very long time, as Lumian kept adding the minimal increment of five hundred each time, he never hesitated. Not once. Verdan would bid and the answer would come back before Venn had finished repeating the number, every time, at exactly the same volume, in exactly the same pleasant tone, as though the numbers were not going up at all. And every third or fourth bid he would let a half-second sit, just long enough for Verdan to feel the floor coming up under him, and then take it anyway.
At forty thousand Verdan turned around in his seat to look at him.
The man smiled at him and raised his paddle again.
At forty-four thousand, Venn had stopped saying thank you, my lord.
At forty-eight, one of Verdan's people leaned in and said something to him and Verdan waved him off with the back of his hand without looking.
At fifty-five thousand five hundred, Verdan said "fifty-six thousand," and it came out of him at a slightly wrong pitch.
And the Lumian put his paddle down on his knee.
Venn waited. He waited longer than he needed to, because he was very good at his job.
"Fifty-six thousand," he said. "With twelve." He looked at forty-one, and forty-one looked back at him with polite interest and did nothing at all. "Fair warning at fifty-six thousand."
The room did not breathe.
The hammer came down.
The applause started before Verdan had stood up, and he did stand up, then turned around to accept it with both arms out, and he was grinning, and for about four seconds it was the finest moment of his life.
Then it stopped being that.
Verdan's arms came down. He looked at forty-one. Forty-one was applauding him, warmly, with his paddle under his arm.
He realized, suddenly, in all the glory of the moment, that number Forty-one, Lumian never wanted it for a second.
Verdan sat down. He did not look at anybody for a while, his face was all twisted, as he found it hard, to contain his rage.
LOT TWO
"Lot two. A table service in white jade and silver. Forty-one pieces, complete, made in the year six-twelve for the coronation of a king this kingdom no longer teaches the name of."
They brought it out on three trays and it was, Zaid had to admit, beautiful.
"It has no properties," Venn said. "None. It is not cursed, it is not awakened, it was not near an Eldritch and it will not do anything for you whatsoever. It is six hundred years old, it is complete, and there is not another complete one anywhere in the world. That is the entire case for it and I make no other."
"Opening at two thousand. Increment five hundred."
It went to nineteen thousand in under a minute.
House Ferrant took it at twenty-two thousand five hundred without the woman ever unfolding her hands. She simply lifted one finger, seven times, over nine minutes.
LOT THREE
"Lot three," Venn said, "and here I must take four minutes of your time, because a number of you are about to bid on a category of object that did not exist when you woke up this morning."
He let that sit.
"Nine and a half months ago, at the start of the epoch, ordinary things began to wake up."
Nobody in the hall said anything.
"Not many. Not everywhere. But enough that the crown has been buying them quietly for six months. Objects with no history of power, held in families or in cellars or in riverbeds for centuries." He looked out at them. "We do not know why. I am instructed to say that plainly rather than let you imagine we are being coy. The crown does not know. Utopia does not know, or does not say. There has been no record of anything like it in any previous epoch, and I have been given no explanation to sell you along with the merchandise."
Zaid, without meaning to, sat forward.
"They are not Eldritch hearts and they are not graded like them. The crown has adopted a separate scale, from E to S, assessed by the crown's own examiners on utility, reliability and risk." Venn's mouth moved slightly. "There is nothing in this auction day above a B, maybe in a later day we get better. I mention it so that nobody starts waiting or saving money."
He nodded at the curtain.
"Lot three. The Pregnant Cube. Grade C."