Chương 23: An Adventuring Company

"Well?" Corso asked.

"Out with it already!" I opened my mouth, fully intending to speak, but something very much like a croak emerged instead. My thoughts had frozen in their tracks, and I closed my now-dry mouth. Then I closed my fist around the gold signet. We were sitting on a small bench in the centre of the Piazza di Santa Cavallia. The same bench that Dast had occupied when we had first met him.

Around us, people crossed between the Statio and the taverns opposite; a bustle of people talking and gossiping, discussing and disputing; oblivious to my world having shifted from one path to another with a suddenness that left me nauseous. It was only many months later that I looked back on those minutes on a bench in a Varenzan piazza and thought: it was not just my own destiny that shifted on that seemingly normal afternoon.

Now, something very much like ice water was pouring down from the inside of my skull and trickling down my back, making me shiver. My mind had completely shut down, and I tried to restart it without much success.

"Vale?" Corso asked again from somewhere far, far away.

"What is going on, are you all right?" I think I registered concern in his voice, but my attention was consumed with the words floating in front of my eyes. Still there. Unyielding and unambiguous, and strangely impassive and flat for the weight they carried. RELIC LINK DETECTED Relationship CACHE Target Type Military disbursement station Bearing East / Beyond the walls Estimated Salvage 12, 000–50, 000 florins I blinked, and the words remained.

Talking about wealth of such a magnitude that it was beyond my ability to fully comprehend.

"Twelve…" I tried to say, but the words caught someplace far down my throat and I swallowed. Corso slapped the back of my head, and not gently.

"Vale!" he hissed.

"Snap out of it. Twelve what? Twelve hundred? Don't joke about such things, Vale — twelve hundred, really?" And I did snap out of it. To some degree. The pain interrupted my growing sense of shock. I closed my eyes and dismissed the prompt, then breathed in. Slowly, consciously, and then back out. I repeated the exercise three times before I opened my eyes again and looked around. There was nobody in our immediate vicinity, and I leaned closer to Corso.

"More…" I began.

"More than that. More florins than you can imagine," I said in a whisper.

"Much more. We need Dast." I began to stand.

"Fuck that, Vale," he said, grabbing my arm and pulling me back down.

"You can't disappear on me like that and not give me details. How much? Are you saying there's another twelve hundred florins linked to that ring?" I clenched my hand and brought the prompt back up, just to see that the number had not changed, and then I told him." Twelve," I said, whispering close to his ear." Twelve, to fifty thousand florins." The colour drained from his face as the pastry fell out of his hands, leaving a streak of butter across his trousers.

My eyes followed the pastry as excitement began to replace the shock. He stared at me, and this time it was his mouth that remained agape as he fought to speak. He got there faster than I had.

"I heard wrong," he whispered back.

"You did not say… Twelve… Fifty thousand?" Then he looked around at the busy square, and down at my clenched fist.

"At least twelve," I whispered back.

"Dast," he said, and I nodded. He was still grabbing my arm, and now he pulled me up as he stood. We walked in the direction of our advocate's office.

"You concealed evidence?" Verin Dast had been pleased to see us for almost half a minute. He had opened his door when we knocked, led us into his small office and slapped both our backs with the exuberance of somebody who had received unexpected but welcome guests. Then I had held my hand out and opened it, a gleaming golden ring resting in the palm of my hand.

"We also… We also found this in the burial chamber below the goldsmith's," I had told him. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. And that was all it had taken to wipe the pleased expression off his face, replacing it with something altogether more intense. Now he was overjoyed, standing behind his desk and looking at the gold signet ring, then back at me with an expression that looked disconcertingly like that of a proud father.

Corso and I sat down, and then Corso told him the story of how the ring ended up staying with us.

"Well," Corso said eventually, answering Dast's accusation.

"Not concealment really… that sounds so… Tawdry. It was ours, and unknown men apprehended us. I just… Kept it for safekeeping. I did not know who they were. They could have been robbers. And then… Then I forgot about it until just now."

"I see," Dast said, his grin growing wider by the minute. Then he lowered his voice and added, "Best not share that reasoning with anyone else. Let me handle this."

"Why? It is true," Corso said. Our advocate seemed unsure how to answer that, and I broke into the pause in conversation.

"And it points to another treasure." Dast tilted his head, and something predatory came across his features.

"Of… Of course it does, my dear client. Where? What kind of place?" A heartbeat, then.

"And the amount, how much?"

"A military disbursement station, somewhere east of Varenza. Apparently outside the city."

"And the amount?"

"It's a range," I said first. The numbers still didn't seem real, but I admit to looking forward to his reaction. He just looked at me.

"At least twelve thousand florins," I said, not able to keep the grin from my face. His mouth stayed shut; his mind was already counting. Then I added, "it can be as much as fifty thousand." Then he slumped down into his chair, shaking his head and looking at me.

"Vale," he said eventually, sounding out of breath as if he had run.

"Who are you? Were you not a quaesitor only last week? And I was just… And now. Twelve thousand. Or more. Fifty thousand florins is… How do we even. And how do we…" As he spoke, his voice got lower and lower, and eventually we could only hear muttering. At last, he stopped, and the room filled with the silence of three men loudly counting florins in their heads as we all looked at the ring, which was now sitting on the desk.

"I could get a proper office," Dast said suddenly in a rushed voice.

"In the Statio. I wouldn't have to hustle out there in the piazza. They would come seek me. I would get the most lucrative cases from the great families." Then a thought flashed on his face and his grin and focus disappeared. He was gone for several breaths and when he came back, he said, "the title of Superior Advocate requires a relevant class, you know. Not experience, or years on the job, or recommendations, or… I would just need a class to support the title. I was vaguely planning that for…

In another two decades, or perhaps three. More likely four or five or never."

"Fuck…" Corso breathed out slowly, drawing the word out until it hung between us as the realisation struck him.

"A class!" He looked at me, then back at Dast.

"I never even thought of that. Classes… Only the rich families can afford classes. What class would you get?"

"Oh," Dast said. His mind was elsewhere while he was answering.

"There are several. Examiner, or Jurist or even Orator. There are always a few up at Auction, every solstice. They usually go for two, or perhaps three thousand." Corso tilted his head to one side.

"That is… That is a lot. Is that typical?" he asked, adding, "I never really followed the Auction. Was never any point. Two hundred or two thousand or ten thousand, it was the same to me. When I was young, I looked at the lists, and then… It just saddened me."

"That is… A fairly normal price. Maybe slightly on the expensive end of the range. There are always jobs for Superior Advocates and their classes are in demand. I think the cheaper classes will go for perhaps four or five hundred florins. Typically they are related to crafts and trades. And then you have the adventuring classes, which are even more in demand. They can get quite unreasonable, the bidding often reaching more than ten thousand. Rarity matters, of course.

I once saw an Epic class go for ninety thousand. To the Quarenghi family, and I don't think they ever shared who in the family they gave it to. There's been speculation ever since. One of those bastards is apparently an Archmage now." Dast looked at me, his eyebrows drawing together, and I could read what he was thinking. I was thinking the same. If Epic was ninety thousand. And Legendary is more. Then how much would a Unique class be?

"And those two or three thousand. You would spend that on a class? It would make sense for you?" Corso asked.

"No. Yes. Maybe. But I enjoy knowing which mistakes are available to me." He looked back at Corso, who looked back at him, and it was obvious they shared the same kind of thought. Dast grinned.

"I see you are thinking about it now too, but before we spend all the florins, let's find them." He drew a clean sheet from a stack.

"Where is this… Disbursement station?"

"East," I said.

"Beyond the city walls." I gestured in what I thought was more or less the right direction. His pen waited above the page.

"How far beyond?"

"Not sure. But it feels… It doesn't feel close. I think we need to do some travelling." Dast lowered the pen.

"A treasure-finding Class that can identify fifty thousand florins, at a distance. I have never heard of such a thing. Gentlemen, what we have here… We discussed this already, but starting right now, I insist that we keep our endeavours a very secret thing. This is more than just… some relics. This is…" He never completed his thought, instead getting up to take a large, blue-bound book down from a shelf.

He made room for it on the desk, first by very carefully picking up the ring and placing it in my hand, and then he shifted documents around so he could open it. It was a book of maps, and Dast opened it to a page that showed Varenza at the centre, but also the immediate countryside; roads travelled away from the Varenzan gates in all directions.

"First things first. Where do you think?"

"East. As I said. Perhaps somewhere beyond the Eastern gate?" I tapped the gate on the map; the Serravalle road started out heading slightly north before straightening up due East. He looked at the map for a moment, his finger tapping a crest marking the area East of Varenza.

"The land that surrounds the road when it leaves Varenza belongs to the Alverno family. It looks like… For at least two kilometres. They have been cutting down trees there for several years. I think they are planning vineyards. Beyond that, not much." He turned a few pages, before pointing down.

"Right here. East of the Alverno claim. The land descends from the hills into swamps, basically. Every spring it floods, and those floods don't recede fully until the winter frost sets in. Used to be filled with fruit trees. The Drowned Orchard they call it now."

"So, we have two possibilities. The treasure is where the Alverno have worked the lands, or… Somewhere in a swamp," I said.

"And given our history, certainly somewhere deep underground," Corso added.

"Possibly and probably," Dast said, and then closed the book.

"In any event, whatever is there, you won't find it by looking at a book." Corso looked up at Dast.

"Can we go there?" It seemed a stupid question, but after the other night I was on Corso's side here. Let's get this crystal clear.

"You can walk on a public road, even if it traverses the Alverno lands. It's when you decide to knock down a wall that things get murky."

"No intention of making a habit of it, Dast," I said flatly.

"But yes, you are right. We need to go out there." Dast was twirling his pen between his fingers.

"Last time got interesting, and we still have the case pending the iudex. This time, let's make it boring. Very boring and very legal." He began gathering his things.

"That makes it easier next time you decide to break things. Come, let's head over to the Collegium." Dast stood up, as did I. Corso remained seated, a grin slowly forming on his face. He looked up at Dast.

"The Collegium?" he asked.

"Why?" He breathed in and held his breath. Something about the man looked like a child about to receive a toy he had desired for a long time.

"Gentlemen," Dast said.

"We are forming an adventuring company."