Harold thumbed the forum open with one hand and drank his coffee with the other. Down the long table, the County's nobility had crowded in for the Solstice, loud with the games the Landing had planned and louder with talk of the auction, and the fire someone had built against the winter cold pushed its heat all the way up to the head of the table where he sat. Somewhere in the middle of it Caswell was telling a story about his Grail quest. Harold let the noise sit at his back and read.
The thread had been climbing all week. It sat second from the top now, under Margaret's northern check-in, and the reply counter ticked up as he watched.
Is the "auction" real? — 312,847,201 replies
He scrolled into the middle of it, where the argument had settled into two camps.
Lord — Verrik
If the auction fires on the solstice like Calder swears it will, then think about what that means. He named the date months out. He named the trade shutdown. He named the Velthari down to how they bond their beasts. Nobody FINDS that in a ruin. Something is wrong with that man, and we are all pretending it isn't.
Adventurer — HoxtonReal
^ this. ruin story is a joke. who finds information like that in a ruin
Crafter — Sable_of_Two_Rivers
And? Say you're right. Say he's system-touched, cheating, whatever word you like. He posted all of it FOR FREE! My lord has a copy of the Velthari brief pinned in our war room right now and that document has saved thousands in the north. You want to spit on the man who handed you that because you don't like how he came by it?
Lord — Verrik
I want to know what he is before I take gifts from him.
Crafter — Sable_of_Two_Rivers
Then you can wonder about it from behind your wall. The rest of us are busy and we’ll take all the information we can get.
He smiled behind his cup as he read the thread.
Adventurer — GastonlookingforhisBelle
honestly who is gatekeeping ANYTHING right now. every lord I've ever served under hoards perks like a dragon on a coin pile. Calder found a way to make humanity stronger and just gave it away. name one other lord who did that. I'll wait
Crafter — Odette
With how humanity is right now we need the help. the south is at war with the kobold region. my brother is down there.
Crafter — Gann
north's worse. the Velthari bonded beasts harass all of our movements. All of our hopes are on the coalition coming next summer
Adventurer — HoxtonReal
mid-west is fighting a gnoll nest that keeps getting bigger every week we don't crack it. we are losing ground in three directions at once and half this thread wants to hold a trial about a man who gave us free intelligence
Adventurer — Potcallingkettleblack
and the grail quests. lords are dying on those left and right. Three lords in my region have died.
Harold drummed his fingers on the table as he kept reading.
Adventurer — Potcallingkettleblack
BUT. my lord came back from his. gave me a skill combination token off the reward pile. I put three perks into it — a body enhancement, a speed perk, and one that quickens my thinking. it fused them into a single perk. the mana it costs me now is a fraction of running all three, and it hits harder than all three did. I’m much stronger now. that came from a grail quest.
Crafter — Karen
so the deaths are worth it? that's the argument now?
The counter jumped four hundred replies before the next one loaded, and Harold slowed on it.
Crafter — Gann
Just had to be a Karen
Crafter — Karen
loot on one side and crumbled stele on the other and everyone is comparing cost vs reward. That's just wrong. somebody's brother is on the wrong side of it.
Adventurer — Pell_gone_south
Odette I'm sorry about your brother. I mean that. and I still think humanity is stronger this winter than it was last winter, more than it's ever been, and both of those are true at the same time. We all know there is no good answer in Gravesend.
Crafter — Odette
yeah. I know. It's just frustrating when everyone is just asking what the rewards from the quest are.
Harold read that, and he drank his coffee. The conversation from the nobility ran over him in the background. Getting Caswell and Bram together was a mistake.
"—so I'm three days up the Blood Cliffs near Silverfin Lake," Caswell was saying, loud enough now that it pulled Harold's attention off the panel, "hadn't slept, hadn't eaten a thing, might've been hungover, just watching this bastard hunt the lake below me. Big ol scaled bastard named Vermak."
"How'd you get it to come to you?" Fitch said.
"Staked a heifer on the clifftop and waited like a patient man." Caswell held a mug in one hand and drew the cliff in the air with the other. "It comes down on the heifer, I put a few ballista bolts through its wings, and a couple explosive ones into its body, and it decided it didn't like that and comes up the cliff face after me. Now I'm on a ledge with my best fighters, the ballista can't aim down at the bastard, and a flying lizard the size of a barn wants to have a bloody talk."
"You fell down on it," Brennig said, from the far end, without looking up from the knife he was cleaning.
"I did NOT fall! You Belgian slander merchant. It TOOK me." Caswell thumped the mug down and the ale jumped. "Got a claw round my leg and pulled me clean off the cliff as it glided away, and I'll tell you what I did. I climbed! Went up the leg, got a hand round the base of its neck, and rode the ugly bastard down when I put my knife through the soft bit under its jaw. Came off it in ten feet of lake, and it hit next to me hard enough to empty half the bloody lake, and when I dragged myself out, the system gave me—" He snapped his fingers, hunting the word, gave up, and just grinned. "—a perk that slows my fall. Falls don't touch me now. I could step off this balcony and finish my beer on the way down."
"That's a good perk," Fitch admitted.
"It's a GREAT perk, and I got a cache of gold with it, and a few of those adventurer perk combination tokens." Caswell dropped back into his chair, pleased with the whole world. "Killed the meanest thing on the Silverfin coast and was home for supper. Best day's work I ever did."
Fitch put his chin back on his palm. "Mine wants me to build a village."
Down the table, Maren set her book down. "The Count already told you what's out there, Fitch." Her voice was quiet enough that Fitch straightened. "That dungeon and the ruins. A whole dead capital for you to loot, and no lord for three weeks in any direction to argue with you over it. You're being handed the emptiest piece of land there is, and every foot of it is opportunity. And I'm sending people to help."
Fitch opened his mouth, shut it, and the flush went up his neck to the tips of his ears.
"She's not wrong," Harold said, without turning his head.
"Course she's not wrong," Caswell muttered. "She's never wrong. It's insufferable."
Maren glared at Caswell over the table, and Fitch edged away.
Harold set his cup down and reached for the pot to fill it again, and that was when the light in the hall changed.
Every head at the table came up on the same beat, and the same panel stood in the air in front of every set of human eyes in the room, in the Landing, in the basin, out across the whole of Gravesend where a human drew breath under the System.
The winter solstice has come.
The crucible-world marks this day as one of weight to your race. The System will hold an auction to celebrate.
Submit items for auction?
Value Tier I?
Value Tier II?
Value Tier III?
Value Tier IV?
Value Tier V?
Fitch had gone still, his chin on his palm. Caswell's grin had frozen halfway up. Down the table Caldwell had come forward over his ledger with his arms thrown up.
Harold heard him murmur under his breath. "He can only be right so many times."
Harold looked at him. Caldwell met the look and gave one small nod. The lots were built. They'd prepped consignments for every tier — potions, alchemical goods, weapons, the best of Rimi's glass — and Caldwell would submit the Landing's under his name and the County's.
Harold looked back at the prompt hanging in front of him and clicked No.
The panel folded and reshaped, and a second one took its place, smaller, the letters cool and even.
Join the Solstice Auction?
The potions had been moving fast since teaching more alchemists and weak healing potions could be taught fairly easily. The Basin grew plants more quickly and more strongly than anywhere in Gravesend, and the coin followed. The Basin was a holy ground for alchemists. The war chest they'd set aside for the auction had climbed past twenty thousand gold.
He clicked Yes.
Around the table the lords were still working through their own prompts, and Renna had cornered Lady Aiko, the words coming too fast for Aiko to do more than nod along.
"Right," Harold said, and set his coffee down. "You all know what to do."
Harold's boots came down on polished stone, and the great hall of the Landing was gone. The system auction house stood up around him instead, same as the first time, and its scale still stopped him for a breath before he made himself move.
The cold hit first, then the sound, a roar of human voices under a ceiling so high you couldn't find the top of it. Pillars the width of houses ran down the hall until distance swallowed them, every surface gilded and carved and worked into figures, whole histories cut into the stone in bands that climbed past where a man could see, and far along its length the hall opened its throat into a intake area the size of a city, tier on tier of seating rising around a floor Harold couldn't see the bottom of. The light came from nowhere and lay gold across all of the polished white marble.
The lords and nobility of the Landing gathered around him in a loose knot and stood with their heads tilted back. Harold watched them instead of the ceiling. He'd have traded a great deal to see it again the way they were seeing it now.
Renna moaned in ecstasy as she looked around her.
"Harold." She'd already stopped walking, already turned in a slow circle with her chin up and her hands half-raised toward the nearest column. "Harold, do you see this? Someone carved a story that runs all the way around a column the size of my hall, and they did it forty times over." She turned again. "I don't have my sketchbook. Where did it go — I need my sketchbook."
"Breathe, Lady Renna," Margaret said.
"Do you understand what I'm looking at?" She snapped back.
"Big rock. Fancy carvings." Caswell tipped his head at it. "Bloody nice, I'll give it that."
Arjun looked up the length of the nearest pillar, arms folded, and gave it a considering nod. "Whoever laid this did not do it for us," he said. "That much work is for the ones who made it, to remind themselves what they are." He looked back down at the crowd. "We are the mice they let in for the day."
That put a beat of quiet through them.
Because past the columns the hall floor was a tide. Humanity poured in by the hundreds of thousands, still wearing whatever they'd been standing in a heartbeat before: armor and aprons and travel leathers, and a man down front in nothing but a nightshirt, all of them turning in slow lost circles, calling names, grabbing strangers by the arm, drifting without knowing they were drifting toward the far end where the light gathered on a long row of stations. And the things working those stations were something else too.
Every hall like this one carried its own carvings, and every human breathing under the System who'd wanted in on the auction had been lifted from wherever they stood and set down in one of them.
"Let's go," he had to yell over the sprawl of humanity around them, and the Landing closed up and moved.
They cut through the place's churn, and it caught on with them fast.
"—that's, wait, is that—" "It's the Potion Lord. That's the POTION LORD—" "LORD CALDER! Lord Calder, over here, please, my lord—" "—Calder—"
A woman got a hand over her mouth and stared as they passed. A boy ran alongside the guards for six strides, grinning like it was a parade, until someone hauled him back by the collar. Somebody deeper in the press started up an ugly shout about the north and got shouldered aside by three people who wanted to cheer, and the shout and the cheer tangled together.
The Landing walked through all of it without breaking stride, heads still tipped up at the carvings. Parker and Garrick opened a path at the front, and the rest filed through behind him.
The stations rose up in front of them.
The things behind the counters stood a head over the tallest man in the hall and had held still, as far as Harold could tell, since the room began to fill. They were narrow, gray as unfinished stone, and their faces held the suggestion of a face. Each wore the same seamless dark livery marked at the collar with the small burning sigil the panels used, and each had four arms, the lower pair folded and still, the upper pair working the air over the counter where light gathered and scrolled into columns only they could read. There were more of them down the row than Harold could count, and past them more rows, and past those the floor, and the whole apparatus of it worked through the flood of humanity without hurry.
The one nearest Harold turned its head, smooth and weightless, like a lamp being aimed.
"Designation," it said. The voice came from no part of it he could point to.
"Harold Calder. Count of the Basin."
The light over the counter folded in on itself and bloomed, the clerk's upper hands went still, and for a long moment it simply read. Then it did something Harold had never seen one of them do: it hesitated. Its lower arms unfolded. Two stations down, a second clerk turned its head toward them without being called, and then a third.
"You have consigned lots," the clerk said. "To Tier Five." A pause that stretched. "And Four. And Three. And Two." The light scrolled. "And One."
"That's right."
"All tiers." It seemed to say it to itself. "Consigning entity, the County of the Landing. Verified." The upper hands moved, a new column rose, and the clerk went still a second time. When it spoke again, there was a care in the flat cadence that hadn't been there before. "Available funds—"
"Should be sufficient." Harold kept his face calm but inside he was exultant.
"—are sufficient for participation at Tier One." Its head tipped toward the sigil on its collar, like it was checking with something higher up. "Lord Calder. The System notes your standing. You are granted a private gallery. Capacity has been adjusted for your retinue."
"Adjusted how?" said Caldwell, and the coin stopped in his fingers.
The clerk turned toward him. "The majority of the retinue qualifies independently at Tier One." A beat. "The gallery has been sized accordingly."
Behind Harold, Caswell made a low sound that might have been a whistle, and Josh said, "Wait, I'm Tier One?" and Caldwell said, without turning, "You own a ridge and a huge waterfall, Josh, and I pay you very well. You just don't check your account." Renna had drifted off again, her hands moving in the air as if she were sketching, and Margaret steered her along by the elbow, with Aiko on her other side.
Harold set his hand flat on the counter. "Some of my people will bid in the lower auctions. They carry my authority." He looked at the clerk. "Send the catalog to them and to us. Then I'd like access to the System store in my gallery."
The clerk hesitated again.
"The catalog will be sent to you." It turned toward its collar a moment before it spoke again. "The System recognizes your status. The store will be opened to you. But only you. Not your retinue." One upper hand turned over, and the golden light gathered and pointed down the length of the hall toward a stair that rose along the near wall of the tiered floor. "Your gallery sits above the innermost block. You will find what you came for there, Lord Calder." The suggestion of a mouth closed.
Harold took his hand off the counter. "I thank the System," he said, and nodded to it.
They moved for the stairs, and Caldwell got to Harold's elbow before they reached it, his voice down under the noise of the hall and coming fast.
"My lord. What is the System store?"
Harold looked at him. "The System opens things to the nobility at events like this. You didn't think I'd tell everyone about the auction ahead of time and keep nothing back for myself?" He kept walking. "Higher the rank, the more it opens. At the very top it opens a store — goods you can't buy anywhere else on Gravesend. I'm the highest-ranked noble in humanity, so it should open for me." He shrugged. "Wasn't certain of it. So I gambled a little. No harm in asking." The corner of his mouth moved. "I think our friend back there was startled by how prepared we came."
Caldwell stopped walking. "Harold. We prepared to buy what people were selling off their grail quests. We did not prepare to buy out of a System store."
Harold stopped and gave him a look. "Caldwell. Very, very few people are going to sell what they pulled off a grail quest." He started walking again. "These Tier One lots will be things humanity dug up and doesn't want or doesn't know what to do with. Everyone's desperate for an edge. That's why we put up the extra siege weapons, the potions, and the rest of it. Nobody's putting a path book on that block. Or a weapon. Or a token. I don't expect to see one all night. But there are a few things I remember getting put up that I want to make sure I get." He glanced sideways at him. "I moved that much gold into reserve for the store. Not the auction." He waved a hand at the humanity behind them. "Very few of them can match our buying power. I'd bet we don't spend more than five thousand gold on the auction itself."
Caldwell walked beside him, quiet for three steps. "I really hate all the secrets you hold sometimes," he said.
Harold chuckled. "You just hate not being included." He turned the corner, and their gallery came into view. "Some things I need to keep close to the chest."