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Chapter 147 — Dragon Anchor
Keeper Authority Insufficient.He had seen that line once before, in a ravine, with his hand on a broken relay node and thirty-one men behind him, and he had spent four months telling himself it meant the Vault was refusing him.Standing in the chamber with his palm flat on stone that gave him nothing, he understood he'd had it backwards.It wasn't refusing him. It was reporting a shortfall.Anchor structure, Ignis said. What's an anchor?I don't know.You've got a book in your head.The book says three words and one of them is damaged.He went along the wall with a lamp until he found where the workings met it, and there the wall stopped being blank.The scaffolding was bolted to something. Knox had assumed rock. It wasn't rock. Under four years of dust and two feet of packed spoil there was a surface with a curve in it, running up out of the chamber floor and away into the hillside on a radius he could not see the end of, and it had a grain to it.Not stone grain. Not any grain.He
Chapter 146 — Someone Was Here First
Nothing attacked them.That was the thing Knox could not make anybody understand afterwards, including himself. A hundred and more beasts turned to face the hillside and stood there, and did not come up it, and did not move, and after twenty minutes Bram sat down on a rock because he could not keep his shoulders braced any longer."They're not going to, are they.""No.""Then what was that?"Knox watched a Ridgeback in the chapel doorway that had not shifted its feet in a quarter of an hour."Attention," he said.They opened a crate that afternoon, on the surface, with everyone present, because Serena said that if they were going to break a Crown seal they were going to be able to say afterwards that all six of them watched it happen.Inside was cable.Not rope — cable, black, thumb-thick, wound on iron spools, and threaded through the core of it a wire of something pale that caught the light wrong.Tobin got a length of it across his palm and dropped it before anybody could ask why.
Chapter 145 — First Contract
Halbeck Cut was a hole in a hillside with a village attached, and the village had been empty for twenty-three years.They came up the valley road on the third afternoon and Knox stopped the group half a mile out, on nothing but instinct, and made Priya put the moth up before anyone went further."Well?"She stood with her eyes half shut and her hand out for a long time."There's a lot.""How much is a lot?""I don't — the moth doesn't count. It gives me shape." Priya's fingers moved. "There's shape all through the village. Down the street, in the buildings, in the yards. It's like a market day."Bram said, "In an abandoned village?""That's what I've got."They went in slowly and found the beasts, and the beasts were the wrong ones.A Ridgeback pack in the old chapel. Three Stoneplate Boars in a walled garden. Two Ashfoxes on a roof. A Duskmoth colony in the mill loft, which made Priya make a noise.None of them attacked.None of them ran, either. They watched the six of them come up
Chapter 144 — The Guild of Knox Morales
The registry office took eleven minutes.Knox had expected something. Not a ceremony — he'd been in enough rooms with platforms in them for one year — but something. What he got was a clerk who counted the signatures, weighed the bank draft, stamped two pages, and slid a numbered brass tag across the counter."Charter's live from today. Twelve months to file a completed licensed contract. If you don't, it lapses and the deposit's forfeit and you can't refile for three years.""Understood.""Everyone says that." The clerk was already reaching for the next docket. "Next."They stood outside on the street with the tag.Guild Charter 4,417 House Morales Founding: six"That's it?" Bram turned it over. "That's the whole thing?""That's the whole thing.""There should be more of it.""There's eleven hundred crowns of it in a deposit box we can't touch," Serena said, "and a hundred and forty-one left over, and rent's forty a month."Bram did the arithmetic on his fingers and stopped halfway.
Chapter 143 — The First Members
The fifth member was the whole problem, and everybody had an opinion about it.Bram's opinion was that they should get somebody terrifying. He had a list. Everyone on it was ranked in the top thirty and not one of them would have signed a charter that cost them their house sponsorship, and Knox let him talk it out for two days before saying so."Then who?" Bram said. "Because if it's about ranking, mate, we're four people averaging about ninety and one of us is two hundred and one.""It's not about ranking.""Everything's about ranking.""Nothing's about ranking," Knox said. "What have we got?"They went round it, and it took an hour, and by the end of the hour it was on paper in Serena's writing.Bram — Ridge Boar, Uncommon. Front. Takes hits. Cannot be moved off a position. Mira — Ashfox, Uncommon. Fast, quiet, small. Sees things. Serena — Prism Vixen, Rare. Illusion, screens, misdirection. Also does the contracts because nobody else can read one. Knox — Ignis, Rare. Gravity, pressu
Chapter 142 — His Own Banner
Eleven hundred crowns.Knox had forty-one. He had forty-one crowns because Blackridge paid a provisional at the enlisted rate and had docked nothing for three months, and he had spent almost none of it because there had been nothing at Blackridge to spend it on.Forty-one, and a lame drake, and no house."Right," Serena said, on the floor of the third-floor room with the paper between them. "Say it anyway.""Say what?""The thing. Out loud. You've been going round it for an hour."Knox looked at the paper."I want to start a guild," he said, and felt stupid."Good." Serena wrote it at the top of the page and underlined it twice. "Now the bad part."The bad part took four hours and filled two sheets.Capital: eleven hundred crowns, held on deposit, not borrowed against a house, which ruled out the only three people Knox knew who had eleven hundred crowns.Members: five founding, each of whom had to sign personally and each of whom lost any existing guild or house sponsorship the moment
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