The auctioneer's voice rose from the floor and filled the hall without ever getting loud, and every conversation in every gallery around the curve died.
"Lot one. Six axes, hand-forged, matched set." Down on the block the light gathered on a rack of them, and the four arms turned a single axe over so the edge caught. "Forged by Denna Roark of the Ashfall, consigned under her own name. The steel carries a minor bleed on the cut. Her work, her design." The lower pair of arms folded. "Opening at eight gold."
"Eight," Caswell said around a mouthful. "For six? That's a steal."
"Eh, Kinda expensive for six axes," Harold said. "Kers can do better work though."
"Aye, but she made them without all your broken advantages." Caswell shrugged. "Man's got to respect the work."
The bidding went up in twos, and the auctioneer named every hand as it came in, flat and even, a lord here and a crafter's consortium there, and each name rolled out to a few thousand people who all turned to look at whoever had just spoken. Harold watched a woman four galleries down go red to her collar when her name got said out loud. Nobody bought anything here quietly.
Josh came over with the catalog open across both forearms and his thumb stuck in it, and he'd stopped chewing.
"Harold." He got in close and dropped his voice. "Hey. Look at this."
"Which lot?"
"Not the lot. The whole back half." Josh set it on the rail and flattened it, and his thumb came down the page. "Sixteen. Twenty-two. Twenty-nine. Thirty-one. Thirty-four." He looked up. "Dude. Those are people."
Harold read it.
Lot 22. Six units, six humans. Consigned by the Concord.
His aura exploded out of him at once. His rage filled the room; every human there felt it stifle them and cowered from the raw emotion.
A few thousand people who had never once stood inside a lord's aura understood Harold Calder at once. Who he was, what he had been through. How he had been marked. Down in the tiers, people screamed and collapsed. Others stumbled away from their gallery while the screams started.
"LORD CALDER."
The auctioneer's voice came down like thunder as his own aura retreated from the man.
"Restrain your presence." The four arms hadn't moved. The suggestion of a face had turned up, finding Harold's gallery at the apex. "The System permits your rank. It does not permit this. Restrain your presence, or you will be restrained."
Harold hauled it back.
It came in slow, and it took everything he had. By the time he had reeled it all back in, the railing had cracked underneath his grip. The hall stayed quiet. A few thousand faces had turned up toward his gallery.
They'd all just been weighed. Every soul in the room.
"Lord Calder." The auctioneer waited a beat. "Lot one continues."
Harold got his eyes back down to the book.
The names were in it. Not one of them was a criminal from Earth. These were farmers, a girl who got more efficiency out of a kiln, and a man who understood the structural integrity of walls. The Concord had gone out, raided other lands, and created lots of them for sale. This was his fault because he warned everyone of the auction. He just never thought they would be so. So. Shameless.
Harold looked up at Josh. The man hadn’t budged when his aura had crashed out, and even now he looked down at him softly.
"Yeah," Josh said. "That's about what I figured you'd do."
His hand pounded his back roughly. The way men hug each other.
"Hey. You'll get the hang of that thing. You got it back in, what, eight seconds? When you started, you almost couldn't get it back in at all. That's growth, man.”
Beth was crossing the gallery. She got both hands up, took Harold's face between them, pulled his head up, and pulled him from his chair into a soft hug. "I know it's hard," she said, into his ear, quiet. "I know."
Then she let him go, and patted his cheek twice, hard enough to sting, and went back to her chair.
"Lot two," said the auctioneer. "A pair of boots. Imbued for silence. Recovered from a barrow in the eastern reach by an adventuring company that declines to name it. Opening at four gold."
"Pass," said Caldwell, without looking up from his ledger. "We can make those."
Harold went and sat down.
Josh dropped into the chair beside him, put his boots on the rail by caswell, and started in on a bag of popcorn he got from somewhere. Margaret arrived without being asked, and set a cup down on the arm of Harold's chair, and the steam came off it into all that gold light.
He picked it up in both hands and inhaled deeply.
The coffee smelled amazing and allowed his body to relax and start thinking.
The Concord was going to buy his potions. They were one of the larger alliances with a couple hundred Lords.
They'd come here with coin, and the Landing had put up thousands of doses across every tier, and healing potions were the one thing in the world nobody had enough of. Reyes Jubilee was going to sit in his cold, formal box and quietly load his campaign wagons from Harold's own stock, and then spend the winter expanding.
Harold looked down at the black in the cup.
"Fuck that," he whispered, and he smiled.
"Margaret."
She was already at his elbow. "My lord."
"I have a task for you and every noble in this box." He kept his voice low and did not take his eyes off the floor. "Go to the galleries. Every alliance you judge we can work with, you'll know them better than I will. Ask them if they want anything the Landing put up." He turned the cup a slow half-circle. "If they do, we'll lend them the gold to buy it from the Concord. Whatever they can't cover, we bankroll. I don’t want the Concord buying any of our lots."
Margaret's pen had already started moving. "The terms?"
"They just need to not allow the Concord to buy out lots. What they can’t cover we will. If they try to play us, they are cut off from our trade." He looked at her. "The Concord wins no lots today. Not one. Not a bandage."
Caldwell's head came up out of the ledger fast.
"Harold." He came across the gallery. "That is deep into the reserves. That is most of the reserve, if the bidding turns hot." He got in close and dropped it down. "What about the store?"
Harold looked up at him, tired.
"I'll go to the store during the break." He had another swallow of the coffee. "As long as I've got twelve thousand gold in hand when I walk in, I'll come out with everything I came for. Anything past twelve is yours to throw at the floor. Spend it all."
Caldwell held on him a second. Then he nodded once, turned, and started talking to Margaret in a hard, fast undertone, his hand already up, calling the lords over.
Henri got there first, with Dalen a half step behind him. Fitch and Caswell came off the rail together, and Maren and Arjun closed in from the back of the box.
Renna was still at the wall, her hand on the carving, her chin up, with no notion that anything had happened at all. He doubted she even felt his aura.
Caldwell laid it out in about forty seconds. Nobody argued. Henri's started smiling.
Harold drank his coffee and watched the floor. It was lot ten before anything moved him.
"Lot ten. A alchemical field kit, imbued for stabilization." The light came down on a case standing open on the block, and the tiers of it lifted and fanned out on their own, glass and brass and a burner and a folded set of legs. "Recovered from a collapsed hold. The consignor declines the naming. The System notes the kit is mana-fed. Opening at forty gold."
Harold looked over at Caldwell and gave him a nod.
Caldwell bid, and the auctioneer said Lord Calder, the Landing, forty, and every head in the hall came up and looked at Harold's gallery again, and the price went to ninety before it stopped.
"That's going to happen all night," Caldwell said, writing. "Every time we so much as breathe."
"Can’t be helped."
"You could let me bid from the floor under my own name."
"They'd work it out inside of two lots." Harold drank his coffee. "Let them pay to watch me shop."
The lords started coming back in ones and twos, and each of them arrived gray and dropped into a chair and handed Margaret a list, and Margaret's pen went down the pages, and the lists went to Caldwell, and Caldwell started running his own quiet war out of the corner of the gallery with a stack of paper and a coin he never stopped turning over his knuckles. His wife was standing next to him proudly.
The lots climbed. Eight gold became forty, forty became ninety, and the hall started to lean forward.
"Lot eleven. A clutch of eleven eggs." The light came down on a nest of them, packed in straw in a crate, each one the size of a man's head and marbled gray and brown. "Recovered abandoned in the high hill country. The consignor states plainly that he does not know what they are, and has declined to guess. The System declines to specify." A pause. "The consignor declines the naming. Opening at twenty gold."
The hall made a noise at that, half-laugh and half-interest.
"Buy those," Harold said.
Caldwell's coin stopped. "You know what they are."
"I know exactly what they are."
Josh leaned over with the bag in his lap. "Okay. What are they?"
"Owlbears," Harold said, into his cup. "Whole clutch. One of them's a rare variant." He watched the crate. "They'll go to the tamers. We've got what, six of them now? Give them something worth the trouble."
Josh threw a handful into his mouth and chewed on it. "Why do you want them, though?"
"Last time around, an adventurer bought that crate." Harold shrugged. "Hatched all eleven. Worked out how to bond with them. Man was a walking army of bears."
Josh stopped chewing. “That is awesome."
"It was, actually. He was pretty famous."
"No, dude." Josh sat forward with his whole body. "Think I could learn that?"
Harold looked at him, at the popcorn, at the drink he'd made himself at the bar, at his boots on a rail the System built.
"Ehh probably not, man," he said, and drank his coffee, and Josh sat back looking wounded about it.
They took the eggs at sixty-five after a scrap with a gallery down the curve, and Caldwell wrote it down and said nothing.
The next few went past him. A shield he didn't want, a map he already had, a bolt of cloth that made Beth sit up and then sit back down when it broke a hundred.
Then the light came down on a pallet stacked shoulder-high in cream-white sheets.
"Lot fourteen. Paper. Fine pressed grade, eight hundred sheets." The four arms turned one up into the light, and it was thin enough that the glow came through it. "Milled by the Ferrow works on commission, unsold when the commission failed. The consignor asks to be named as the Ferrow family of the Bight. Opening at four gold."
Renna came off the wall like she'd been fired out of a rocket tube.
"Four!"
"Lady Renna of the Basin. Four gold."
"Six," said somebody down the curve, and Renna's turned and stared at them.
"Eight."
"Ten."
"Fourteen," Renna said, and there was something building in her voice.
It went up and up. Two independents got into it, and a gallery across the way got into it, and Harold watched Renna's hand go tighter on the rail every time the auctioneer said a number that wasn't hers, and it broke thirty and kept climbing, and at forty-one she stopped.
She stood there with her jaw set. Then she turned around and looked at Harold, and her eyes were wet.
Harold laughed at her, low, and tipped his head at Caldwell.
Caldwell rolled his eyes so hard it took his whole head with it.
"Big softie," he muttered, raising a finger. "Forty-five." His wife swatted him.
"The County of the Landing. Forty-five."
Nobody went past it.
Renna made a sound that no one in that gallery had ever heard from a grown noblewoman before, grabbed Caldwell's face in both hands, and kissed him on the forehead. Then she was at the rail, shouting down that she'd take delivery now, and the clerks brought it up. Within two minutes, Renna was on her knees at the base of a column, a sheet flat against the stone, a charcoal stub going back and forth, and a rubbing of the column's end.
She had four sheets down before Henri drifted over with his glass.
"Lady Renna." He looked at the pallet, then at the floor, and his eyebrows rose. "That is fine paper. That paper was milled for fine books. You are aware you are using it to take rubbings off a wall like a child in a—"
"Go eat a baguette, Henri."
Garrick sprayed beer. The gallery died laughing. He laughed along with the rest of them and motioned for Henri to join him. Henri stood in the middle of it all, his cheeks going red as a lamp, his glass held tight to his chest.
"It is a fine paper," Henri said, to nobody, and withdrew.
Renna never looked up. She was already on the fifth sheet.
Harold wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and got his coffee back.
"Lot fifteen. Healing potions. One hundred doses, standard, sealed." The light came down on the crates, and the hall leaned in without a sound. "Brewed and consigned by the County of the Landing, under the name of Count Harold Calder. The System notes the potency exceeds the standard bracket by a margin it declines to publish." The four arms went still. "Opening at sixty gold."
They cost forty to make.
"Sixty," said the Concord's box.
Harold looked over at Margaret.
"South," she said. "Across the sea, under the kobold line. They're the ones who lost the coast this autumn." Her finger came down the page. "They can afford up to 90 gold."
"Give them up to three hundred."
Margaret's pen moved, and somewhere a message went, and eleven seconds later a gallery on the far side of the curve put a hand up.
"Sixty-five."
"Seventy," said the Concord.
"Eighty."
"Eighty-five."
"One hundred and ten," said the southern box, and the room exclaimed while the Concord went quiet.
Down there on the far curve, a man in a stained coat stood up at his rail with a cup in his hand and looked all the way across the hall at Harold's gallery, and he raised it, and held it up, and didn't say anything at all.
Harold raised his coffee back.
Galleries over, one of Reyes's people had both hands flat on his own rail, trying to figure out what had just happened.”
"They'll work it out soon," Caldwell said, writing.
" Doesn't help them." Harold drank. "They can't outbid a man who's printing the money."
"Lot sixteen."
The light came down, and it came down on people.
Five of them, in a line on the block, in clean clothes somebody had put them in for this. Two men, three women. One of the women was maybe nineteen and had her chin up and her hands were shaking so hard Harold could see it from the top of the hall.
"Five units, human. Adult. Healthy." The auctioneer's flat voice went out over a few thousand of the best of humanity, and every one of them heard it. "Consigned by the Concord. They all have low tier perks helpful towards industry." The arms folded. "Opening at fifteen gold."
Harold stood up.
He put both hands on the rail and leaned out over the hall, and the room stopped.
"Members of humanity."
It carried over them all until he had their full attention.
"The Landing will not abide the selling of people. There is no argument you can bring me about it." He let that filter through the dense minds of some of them. "Those five are not criminals. They were taken in raids by the Concord to be sold here.”
Somewhere down in the tiers, one voice shouted something short, and a hundred more followed.
"The Landing will buy every human being on that block tonight.” His voice came up. "And if you fight me for them, understand what you are doing. I will bar you from trade with the Landing. Every potion, every blade, every seed. And I will withdraw the offer that I made to half of you. And if any of you here are enslaving humans. Expect a visit from my Legion."
The hall broke.
It went up all at once, thousands of them, and the Concord's box was on its feet yelling at him, shouting, and Reyes Jubilee stood at the front of it with both hands on his rail, staring at Harold thoughtfully. He just looked up at Harold and tipped his cup towards him.
"Order." The auctioneer let it ride for 10 seconds longer. "Order. Lot sixteen opens at fifteen gold."
"Fifteen," Harold said.
"Twenty," said a gallery on the southern arc, and the man who said it was smiling up at Harold with his glass in his hand and no shame anywhere.
"Thirty."
"Forty."
"Sixty."
"Eighty," and he was still smiling.
"One hundred," Harold said.
The gallery waited three long seconds, and let the whole hall watch him wait, and then he shrugged, sat down, and settled back into his chair, looking like a man who'd had a lovely evening.
"The County of the Landing. One hundred gold. Sold."
Harold turned his head.
"Margaret. Who."
She didn't need the page. "Southernmost reach, my lord. Further south than the kobold region, across the sea. We know almost nothing about them."
Harold looked at the man in the far gallery for a long moment. Harold started to smile as he thought about his options. They were in an interesting area.
"Find out where their towns are," he said.
Margaret wrote, and beside her Beth looked at the side of Harold's face, then away.
More lots came. Three more went to the Landing, and one of them cost him two hundred gold because the same southern gallery bid it up out of pure appetite and then let it go at the top. A short sword that sang. A book the entrances to the deep dark. Caldwell's stack of loan paper got thinner.
"Lot twenty."
The light came down on a nail.
It was maybe nine inches, black, square-shanked, and it sat on a cloth on the block looking like something you'd pull out of a barn wall.
"An artifact of unknown function." The auctioneer's four hands were still. "Recovered from a ritual chamber in the Deep Dark by Lord Aurel Vance and company. The chamber's occupant contested the recovery. The System notes that three hundred and eleven human adventurers died in the taking of this object." A beat. "The System declines to classify it. Lord Vance states he has no use for it and asks to be named. Opening at five hundred gold."
Five hundred gold for a nail.
Harold took a sip and waited.
"Five hundred," said the Concord. They hadn’t won a single lot so far in the auction.
Nobody else moved. That was a lot of gold for an unknown object.
"Five hundred, going once."
"Six hundred," Harold said.
The Concord's box came up out of its chairs.
The noise off them was better than anything Harold had felt all night, and it went on long enough that the auctioneer had to put a hand up, and somewhere in it a man was shouting that Calder didn't even know what it was, he was bidding because they'd bid.
"Seven hundred."
"Nine hundred," Harold said.
"Twelve."
"Fifteen hundred."
Caldwell's coin had stopped moving a while back.
It went to twenty-two hundred gold, and the Concord came again at twenty-four, and Harold said "Three thousand" in the tone of a man ordering breakfast.
"The County of the Landing. Three thousand gold. Sold."
Josh leaned in with the empty bag crumpled in his fist.
"Okay," he said. "That's a nail. Please, please tell me you know what it actually is."
"It's a relic."
Josh looked at him, stunned. “How did the lord that put it up for auction not know that?”
"Relics go in the reliquary, and everybody in the hold gets the—"
"Different kind of relic." Harold watched the clerks lift the cloth by its corners. "That's a personal relic. It doesn't go in a reliquary. It binds to one man, which is exactly why Aurel Vance is standing down there right now feeling clever about the three thousand gold he just took off me. He’s a good man though, I’ll consider it an investment." He set his cup down. "He never bound it. Never occurred to him, and he probably doesn't know how.."
"And it'll bind to you?"
"Sure, I just need to drop a blood on it, and I’ll bind it."
Josh looked at the block, then at Harold, and a wonder crossed his face again.
"What's it do, Harold?"
Harold watched the clerk fold the cloth over the nail and lift it, and he thought about a room long ago, a bench, and a man who had taken him apart with a great deal of patience to see what came loose.
Harold looked at him softly. "Trust me, you don't want that relic, Josh," he said. "It allows all of my attacks to gain a vampiric aspect. I’ll be able to heal from strikes, and I think there's a chance to steal perks and other things." Harold looked lost for a moment. “I knew the previous owner. “He went mad eventually. The relic would take memories sometimes from his victims.” Harold shook his head. “It’s more cursed object than relic, Josh. All relics in the deep dark come with negatives, but they are more powerful because of it.”
Josh was quiet a second.
"Then why are you taking it?"
Harold turned the cold cup in his hands and watched the clerks carry the nail off the block.
"Because I'm the strongest I have ever been and the weakest," he said, with no emotion. "I can stand in a storm, weather tragedy, and I can eat pain and keep walking."
He drank what was left and turned to Josh.
"But there's a sickness sitting in my soul, Josh, and it's the one thing I can’t shake. It walks behind me all day, and it gets out in front of me at night." He set the cup down on the rail. "Every soul in that hall felt it an hour ago. You felt it."
Josh didn't say anything.
"So they put a cursed thing on the block that drinks the dying and eats a man's memories and walks him into madness." Harold shrugged. "What's it going to put in me that isn't in there already? It'll have to make room."
"Harold—"
"And here's the part that keeps me up." He looked over. " If someone offered tonight to take my troubles. The hurt parts of me." He looked into the empty cup. "I'd tell them no."
He watched the clerks take the nail out through the arch below.
"So who'd I be without it? I've no idea, Josh, and I've never met the man."
"The auction will pause," said the auctioneer, "for one half hour."
The light came up all across the hall, and four thousand people started talking at once, and Harold set the cold cup down on the rail and stood.
"Right," he said. "I'm going shopping."