The lure was as long as Mav’s arm, and it had stopped glowing a week ago.
Six had carried it home from the trench in his claw on the last day of the month, and he had refused to eat it or to let anyone else eat it. It had hung in the second larder ever since, a soft gray stalk with a dried-up bulb at its end. Mav had forgotten that it existed until Quill said one sentence in class.
"Beasts leave things behind," she had said. "It can be a horn, a tooth or a heart. The stronger the beast is, the better the price will be. Half of you have been throwing away your first fortune because it smelled bad."
Mav had gone home that night and taken the lure down from its hook.
Now he stood at the entrance of the Great Market with the lure wrapped in his old jacket, and he tried not to look like a boy from the foundry district who had never seen so much money in one place.
It was difficult. The market filled a square larger than the plaza of arches, under a roof of colored glass held up by pillars as thick as towers. There were hundreds of stalls. He saw cages of light with nothing in them, swords that sang, and jars of something that moved. One shop sold nothing but maps, and the whole front of another shop was a single sheet of gold. The noise was like the foundry at full shift, except that every voice in it was selling something.
Almost every stall flew the same small banner beside its own. It showed a gold cloak on a black field.
’Goldmantle. So they’re the ones who take a cut.’
House Goldmantle was the Imperial House that controlled trade, so it made sense to see its banner everywhere. Mav had come early with Ronald, who had sold three boar tusks here the week before and now considered himself an expert.
"Don’t take the first price," Ronald said. "I took the first price, and Tamsin says that I was robbed."
"Who’s Tamsin?"
"She’s a girl in our class, the thin one. She’s good with numbers, like you." Ronald pointed with his chin. "Look over there. The beast traders are along the back wall."
-----
Before coming here, Mav had needed to understand how anyone paid for anything.
Quill had explained it on his second day, and he had thought about it every night since.
There was no coin in the Nexus. There was only Essence, and an Awakened didn’t carry Essence in a purse. He carried it in his Heartstone.
When he bought something, the Arbiter took the price out of his third bar and put it into the seller’s bar. When he sold something, it went the other way. So every meal, every sword and every lesson was paid for with a piece of his next rank.
That was why the great houses stayed great. They had so much Essence coming in that they could spend a lot and still rise. It was also why a commoner could work for 10 years and never see rank D, because he had to spend most of his Essence just to live.
’So every Essence I spend adds days to the road. I’ll have to remember that at every stall.’
It didn’t frighten him. He had bargained for everything he owned since he was 10, and he was good at it.
The trader he chose was a heavy woman with a small round lens pushed up on her forehead and arms like a butcher’s. Her stall was hung with teeth, claws and things in jars. She watched him unwrap the jacket without interest.
Then she saw what was in it, and she became interested.
She hid it quickly and well. But Mav had spent a month watching creatures that couldn’t speak, so he noticed. Her face had changed for half a heartbeat, and her hand had started toward the lens before it stopped.
"It’s the lure stalk of a trench angler," she said, in a bored voice. "It died a while ago, and the bulb is dried out." She shrugged. "It’s a strange little thing. I’ll give you 150 Essence for it."
Ronald drew a breath to say that it sounded fair, so Mav stepped on his foot.
"What rank was the beast?" Mav asked.
"I couldn’t say."
"It was rank E+. It was the strongest beast in my World, and this is its skill, the whole of it, in one piece." He began to fold the jacket back over the lure. "A skill organ like that doesn’t come out of a rank F World very often. I think you know it, because you nearly reached for your lens. I’ll try the next stall."
There was a short silence.
The woman pulled the lens down over her eye and looked at him through it. This time, she wasn’t looking at the lure.
"Who taught you to bargain, boy?"
"A man who sold ration bars behind a foundry."
She made a short sound through her nose, and it might have been a laugh.
"I’ll give you 400."
"I want 1,200."
"You’re out of your mind. I’ll go to 600."
"The bulb isn’t dried out. It’s empty because the beast is dead, and you know that it can be filled again. I’ll take 1,000."
They went on like that for some time. Ronald watched with his mouth open, turning his head from one side to the other like a man following a ball. Mav felt better than he had in days.
They shook hands at 900 Essence.
Letters rose between them.
[Sale agreed: 900 Essence.]
[Trade tax, House Goldmantle: 180 Essence.]
[720 Essence has been added to your Heartstone.]
Mav stared at the second line, and his good mood turned sour.
"They take a fifth?"
"They take a fifth," the trader agreed. She sounded like someone who paid it 40 times a day. "It’s the same on every sale in the Nexus. Welcome to the market, boy."
He opened his Status, because he couldn’t stop himself.
[Heartstone: 2%]
Far away, at the bottom of his sea, his Heartstone had begun to beat a little faster. He could feel it faintly, like a second pulse.
For a moment, he felt proud of himself.
Then he started spending it.
-----
The clothes cost 30 Essence.
He walked past the good stalls and went to the cheap ones. He bought a gray shirt, a dark jacket, a pair of trousers that reached his ankles, and boots with real soles. The seller also gave him a strip of leather to tie back his hair.
There was a tall mirror beside the stall. He hadn’t seen his own face in more than a month, so he stopped in front of it.
He almost didn’t recognize himself.
The boy who had walked up to the stone had been thin, with a hungry look and an old jacket. This one was thin in a different way. His shoulders had become broader. The softness had gone out of his face, and his skin was pale, almost gray, after a month without sun. His black hair hung to his collar. His eyes were still dark, but they no longer looked away from the mirror. They looked straight back at him, steady and a little cold.
A plain green scarf was tied around his neck. Under his new shirt, One lay flat around his chest, and not a thread of green showed. Anyone who looked at him now would see a thin, pale boy from a poor school, and nothing else.
’Juno is going to say that I look like a drowned man.’
The thought of her hurt, so he turned away from the mirror.
The money changers sat under the largest of the gold banners. He handed over 90 Essence and watched it become 270 credits, a small, heavy stack of coins. It was more than his uncle earned in two months. He put it in his inside pocket and kept his hand on it. Credits were only useful on Earth, which was why he didn’t change more.
That left 600 Essence in his Heartstone.
He walked to the far end of the market, where a black arch stood behind a line of soldiers in dark red, and he read the board beside it.
[The Homegate. Passage to Earth and return: 600 Essence.]
Mav read it again, slowly, in case the number changed.
It didn’t change. He looked at the small number in his Status, which he had owned for less than an hour.
"Of course," he said.
Ronald, who had saved for a week to make the same trip, patted him on the shoulder.
Mav paid. He felt the Essence leave him, as if someone had opened a tap in his chest.
[Heartstone: 0%]
Neither of them noticed the woman in the gray coat. She had been standing at the map shop for some time, watching them while she pretended to read. She was about 30, with brown hair tied back and a face that was hard to remember.
She watched Mav hand 600 Essence to a soldier of House Pyrecrest, which controlled the Homegate. Then she joined the same line, four places behind him.