Two Ilyas and a Marquis

The Delvers' Guild hall in Sallow was a long stone room that smelled of ink and old rope, and at the far end of it, behind a desk piled with ledgers, sat a girl of sixteen with a quill behind each ear. Her name was Ilya Marsh. She was the Guild's registrar, she had the only grade-SSS talent recorded in Sallow in forty years, and she had never once set foot below the first floor.

"Corwen Ashe," she said, without looking up. "Lantern Company. Journeyman Blade. Level 14. You cleared three rockhound nests on the fourth floor yesterday and you are here to log them, and you are also here to ask me when the Marquis arrives, because everyone is."

"Tomorrow," Corwen said. "Noon. He comes with his wife and his son and sixty horse, and he stays four days."

Ilya Marsh looked up for the first time. She had pale eyes and a face that gave nothing away, and she studied him the way she studied a column of figures. "How do you know that?"

He had known it because he had lived it. He said, "Tallow told me," which was a lie, and she wrote it down anyway.

The SSS grade was the thing people whispered about in Sallow, and the thing people got wrong most of all. A talent grade measured how quickly you could climb, and Ilya Marsh, by the Guild's own testing stone, could climb faster than anyone alive. She had chosen not to. She was Level 2. A Level 2 registrar with an SSS grade could be killed by a rockhound, and she knew it, and she kept her quills and her ledgers and left the Ladder to the people who liked bleeding.

"Three nests, logged," she said. "Seventy copper pennies to the Company, eighteen to you. Go and spend it."

Eighteen pennies. Corwen took them and went out into the sun.

Sallow was dressing itself for the Marquis. The Vane banner, a white tower on grey, hung from every second window along the Wellmouth road. Vael was ruled from Vaelmere by Queen Isolde, and under the Queen stood the great lords in their order: the Marquises first, each with a city and its lands; the Viscounts beneath them, holding towns in the Marquises' names; and at the kingdom's edges the Margraves, who held the border marches and answered to the Queen alone. Sallow and the Wellmouth belonged to Edric Vane, the Marquis of Sallow. Viscount Ferrand Oake held the mill-town of Ketter in the Marquis's name. Margrave Hollis Dunmere held the northern march against the Hask tribes, and in the first life he had been the one lord who had sent soldiers when the Calamity came. Corwen filed that away.

Halfway down the Wellmouth road, under a sign painted with three brass balls, was the pawnshop of Ilya Marsk.

Corwen stopped outside it. Ilya Marsk and Ilya Marsh shared four letters and nothing else. Marsk was a man of sixty with a bald head and a jeweller's glass on a cord, and he had never been inside the Guild hall in his life. He had lent Corwen's father four gold crowns against Greyhallow in the winter of 1158, and when Corwen's father had died on the ninth floor the following spring, the debt had passed to the son, and Marsk had been good enough to forgive one crown of it in memory of the dead. Three crowns remained.

The bell over the door rang. Marsk looked up from a tray of rings.

"Ashe. You have money?"

"Eighteen pennies."

"Then you have no money. Three gold crowns, boy. Sixty silver marks. Six thousand copper pennies. I can do the sum for you as often as you like." He jerked his chin at the wall behind him, where Greyhallow hung in its scabbard between a cracked lute and a stuffed owl. "She stays there until you can."

"I'll have it by midsummer."

Marsk laughed, not unkindly. "Your father said that too."

Corwen looked at the sword for a long moment. The blade had been forged in Vaelmere and carried a smith's quality mark on the ricasso, three stacked bars, which meant Masterwork steel. There were three quality marks a Vaelmere smith could stamp: one bar for Plain, two for Fine, three for Masterwork. It was a grade of the steel, not of the man who carried it. His father had been an Apprentice Blade all his life and had still owned a Masterwork sword, and the sword had not saved him.

"Midsummer," Corwen said again, and went out.

He had a reason to believe it this time. In the first life, the Lantern Company had gone down to the twelfth floor in the fourth week of spring and come back with a Hollow Wyrm's carcass, and the Guild had paid two gold crowns for the hide alone. Corwen had been on the sixth floor that week, pulling rats. He did not intend to be on the sixth floor this time.

The Marquis came at noon the next day, as Corwen had said he would.

Edric Vane rode in under the white tower banner on a grey horse, a lean man of forty-five with a soldier's seat and a courtier's smile. Beside him rode his wife. Lady Sabine Vane was the daughter of a Margrave, and she rode like one, straight-backed and unhurried, with a falcon's hood on her saddle-bow. Behind the Marquis and his wife rode their son. Aldous Vane was eighteen, fair-haired, a Journeyman Blade himself by the sword-knot on his hilt, and he looked at the Wellmouth the way a boy looks at a thing he has been told he is destined to conquer.

The Lantern Company stood in a line on the Warden's steps with the other companies, and Captain Tallow read the Wellmouth's accounting aloud to the Marquis in his crown-blue coat. Corwen, from the end of the line, watched the Marquis's son. In the first life Aldous Vane had led the Marquis's guard down the Wellmouth stair in the first hour of the Calamity, and had been the first of them to die. His father had not spoken for a month afterward. His mother had never, as far as anyone knew, spoken of it at all.

"Your Grace," Tallow was saying, "the floors stand as follows. The Shallow floors, one through ten, are worked daily by the companies and are safe for Apprentices under escort. The Deep floors, eleven through thirty, are Journeyman ground and worse, worked by licence. The Abyssal floors below thirty-one are closed by the Queen's order, and no company has held a lantern there in nine years."

"And the beasts," said the Marquis, "stay where they are put?"

Tallow hesitated. It was a small thing, and Corwen was perhaps the only one who caught it, because he was the only one who knew what it meant.

"There have been," the Warden said carefully, "three Deep-floor beasts taken on Shallow floors since the thaw, your Grace. A rockmaw on the seventh. Two bone-jackals on the ninth. The companies have been told to go armed for Deep work on any floor below five."

"Why?" said the Marquis.

"We do not know, your Grace."

The Marquis's wife turned her head and looked, for a moment, not at the Warden but at the black lip of the Wellmouth, and her face did nothing at all.

Corwen had heard that answer before, in the first life, and had thought nothing of it. Three Deep beasts on Shallow floors in the spring of 1160. Eleven by the autumn. And then eight years of quiet, and then the Calamity. Nobody had ever asked, in the first life, why the beasts had started climbing. He meant to ask now. Something was driving them up from the Deep, and whatever it was had eight years to finish its work.

That evening Maud Ferris called the Company together in the bunkhouse.

"Twelfth floor," she said. "Friday. The Guild wants a wyrm hide for the Marquis's visit and the Guild is paying two gold crowns for one. I want six Blades and four shields. Rook, both of you. Ashe, you've been asking for Deep work since the thaw and you can have it. If you die down there I'll dock your wages."

"Yes, Maud," said Corwen, and across the room Tamsin Rook caught his eye and grinned, and he had to look away.