Calrel_04

  The Mercenary Trading Yard sat behind a decommissioned tannery on the eastern edge of the market district, and the ghost of its former life still haunted the air. Old leather, chemical tang, together with something animal and sour that had soaked into the stone walls decades ago and refused to leave.

  Someone had stretched a canvas awning between the tannery wall and a row of crooked wooden posts, creating a shaded area rge enough for a dozen rough tables and twice as many crates that served as seats. The ground was packed dirt, stained dark in pces. A barrel of cheap ale had been tapped in one corner, ringed by cy cups that nobody seemed to wash between uses.

  This was a pce that had just happened, the way a footpath did - enough people walked the same route until the grass stopped trying. Mercenaries and delvers had been trading loot here long enough that the arrangement had turned into permanence, and nobody with authority had bothered to shut it down.

  Leo threaded his way between two groups of armed men sorting carapaces on a table. A woman sat in the corner restringing a crossbow, ignoring everyone. Three delvers in mud-caked boots argued about the split from their st run. The smell of dungeon loot, mineral dust and fungal rot, yered over the sweat and cheap ale and the tannery ghost until the air itself felt thick.

  He'd already scouted Kerrin's prices before leaving Ashwick. His margins were wide enough to drive a cart through, but in Ashwick, he was the only game.

  Here, the game was different.

  The buying table sat at the yard's center, positioned under the thickest part of the awning. Behind it sat a man who looked like he'd been growing into that chair for twenty years.

  He was not built for the dungeon. Soft through the middle, the kind of thickness that came from good meals and limited movement. Narrow shoulders, unhurried arms, a neck that disappeared into a jaw that had long since lost its definition.

  Late forties, possibly older. His head was shaved clean, the scalp tanned and spotted, and he'd compensated with a beard - dark, close-trimmed, threaded with gray, maintained with a precision that nothing else about him suggested. His clothes were better than a delver's but worse than a proper merchant's, a linen shirt under a leather vest with pockets, both carrying the faint smell of cedar from a clothes chest.

  His hands were the contradiction. The fingertips calloused, nails cut short and filed smooth, moving over objects with the intimacy of someone who'd spent decades identifying materials by touch. His eyes matched the hands - dark and quick.

  In front of him were a set of brass scales, a magnifying loupe on a leather cord, cloth pouches arranged by size, and a ledger so old the binding had been repced at least twice.

  "Welcome!" He greeted Leo with a wide smile that showed rows of crooked teeth. His eyes darted to the heavy pack Leo was carrying. "You selling?"

  "Good morning. And yes," Leo nodded and set his pack on the edge of the table before pulling out the first bundle.

  Three giant beetle armor ptes. He unwrapped them one at a time, setting each on the table where the light caught the mineral crust.

  The buyer didn't speak. His hands moved to the nearest pte, lifting and turning it, running one calloused thumb along the crust's grain. He then set it down and moved to the second, repeated the process. Then the third.

  "Mutated," a gravelly rasp surfaced from deep in his chest, the kind of voice that cut through cmor without raising. He nodded once as genuine admiration touched his features. "Good job, if you're the one who took it down. Good condition. No cracks in the mineral yer. One silver thirty each."

  A silver thirty, Kerrin had offered a ft silver per pte. Thirty coppers more per piece wasn't spectacur, but across three ptes it added up to almost a full silver difference.

  "Deal," Leo said.

  The buyer pulled the ptes to his side of the table and reached for the coin pouches. Three silvers and ninety coppers counted out with the mechanical speed of someone who'd made this motion thousands of times.

  Leo id the Veilcap bundles down next. Two cloth-wrapped packages. The man unwrapped one, examined the stalks, checking for bruising simir to how Sera did. Then he brought the bundle to his nose and inhaled, a single short breath through the nostrils. The scent told him something, because his eyes narrowed a fraction before the professional mask smoothed it away.

  "Clean harvest. No bruising on the caps. One silver seventy per bundle."

  Leo did the math. The specialist tanners and leatherworkers in Rockhaven would probably pay more, but finding them, haggling, waiting for them to inspect and verify, all of that cost time he didn't want to spend today.

  "Okay."

  Three silvers and forty coppers joined the first pile. Leo swept everything into his coin pouch. The weight of it felt substantial now.

  Then he pulled out the Stonemorel pouch, and the delicious, buttery smell made itself known immediately.

  The change in the buyer was subtle. His hands, which had been resting ft on the table between transactions, shifted. The fingers curled inward slightly. His eyes moved from Leo's face to the pouch.

  A flicker of interest showed on his face that the professional mask couldn't quite smother.

  Leo untied the drawstring and opened the pouch on the table, and the aroma intensified. Even in the open yard, with ale and sweat and tannery ghost competing for space, the Stonemorels cut through. Two delvers at a nearby table turned their heads.

  The buyer leaned forward. Lifted a single dried cap between his calloused thumb and forefinger. Turned it in the light. Brought it to his nose and closed his eyes for a second longer than professional assessment required.

  "Dried properly," he said. "Good color. Three silvers and forty coppers."

  Leo knew the market price from Marsh. Four silvers for a fist-sized pouch of dried Stonemorels. But he'd made a round through the market before coming here, checking the spice merchants' stalls.

  The answer had been the same at every stall: dried Stonemorels hadn't appeared in Rockhaven in weeks.

  Three silvers and forty coppers was an insult.

  "Five silvers," Leo said.

  The buyer's hand, still holding the dried cap, went still. His dark eyes lifted from the morel to Leo's face.

  "Five silvers," the rasp in his voice fttened. "For a single pouch."

  "Dried Stonemorels have been scarce tely. I checked," Leo kept his voice even. "Every spice merchant in the square would take this off my hands before I finished my sentence. Five silvers, or I walk."

  The buyer set the cap down. A grimace pulled at the corners of his mouth, tugging the careful beard. Clearly he'd been hoping Leo wouldn't know what he was sitting on.

  "Four silvers. Market price."

  "Five."

  "You're killing me, boy."

  Leo said nothing. He reached for the pouch.

  The buyer exhaled through his nose. A short, sharp breath, the sound of a man running calcutions and arriving at an answer he didn't like but couldn't argue with. His hand came up, palm ft.

  "Fine. Five," he shook his head, but the grimace was already loosening into something else, something that looked suspiciously like respect.

  He leaned back in his chair, and a grin cracked through the grimace, slow and self-aware. The grin of a man caught doing something he wasn't ashamed of.

  "Tadeo Morcante," he said, pressing a hand to his chest. "You can't fault a man for trying to get a better price. Especially when I'm not buying this for the table. I'm buying for me."

  "For you?"

  Leo could see it now, the way Tadeo had closed his eyes when he smelled the cap. That was appreciation.

  "Five silvers it is," Tadeo said. "I'll take the loss today."

  He counted the coins with the same mechanical speed as before, but his eyes kept drifting to the pouch. When the payment was done and Leo secured the coins, Tadeo drew the Stonemorel pouch to his side of the table with both hands, carefully, the way you'd handle something fragile. He retied the drawstring and tucked it into a vest pocket instead of the loot pile.

  "Thank you," Leo shouldered his now considerably lighter pack. Twelve silvers and thirty coppers heavier in the coin pouch, and there were still the Stonecaps carapaces back home waiting to be sold, as well as the coins they found at the abandoned camp site - four silvers and twenty-five coppers.

  Not a bad run, a small grin tugged at the corner of his mouth.

  "One more thing," Tadeo's voice caught him before he'd taken two steps. Leo turned back.

  "If you find anything else down there, food, spice, anything edible and rare, bring it to me," Tadeo's dark eyes were steady, the professional mask back in pce but thinner now, the personal interest visible through it. "I'll give you the best price you'll find in this town."

  "I'll keep that in mind," Leo said.

  Leo didn't leave the yard immediately.

  The equipment tables ran along the far wall of the tannery, pnks set on sawhorses, piled with gear that other delvers had outgrown, repced, or stripped from their packs to make room for loot. Most of it was junk. Dented helmets with loose rivets. Vambraces where the stitching had given up and the leather curled away from the ptes like dead bark. Ankle guards that had been repaired so many times the original material was a philosophical question.

  Leo took his time. He picked through the piles and his eyes eventually caught some good pieces buried underneath. A pair of leather vambraces with iron ptes still firmly seated, the leather oiled recently enough that it flexed without cracking. Three helmets of varying size, open-faced, the kind that covered the skull and cheekbones without blocking peripheral vision. Two sets of ankle guards, hardened leather with simple buckle closures, stiff but well-made.

  He tested each one - bent the leather, checked the buckles, and squeezed the helmets to feel for give in the frame. He knew Sera's and Marsh's dimensions, close enough to estimate fit. The smaller helmet would work for Sera. The rgest one was still just a little tight for Marsh's skull, but it would do.

  New armor was expensive, and he could always upgrade these ter. They just have to be well-conditioned enough to survive their test run.

  He haggled where the prices allowed it and paid where they didn't. The vendor, a leathery woman with cropped hair and a missing front tooth, wrapped the pieces in cloth and helped him strap them to the outside of his pack when the interior ran out of space. And the pack was heavy again.

  Leo said goodbye before leaving the yard.

  Mud slurped at his boots, sucking his feet down with each stride he took back toward the marketpce.

  Last night's rain had left the ground a sloppy mess of brown water, thick with the detritus of the day - hay, dung, and whatever the wind had carried - and he found himself veering left, then right, in a slow dance around the worst of the puddles that had collected in the ruts of the path. The squelching sounds followed him into the noise of Rockhaven.

  Garron's stall was a familiar stop. The butcher stood behind his blood-stained counter, massive forearms working a cleaver through a joint of something with the rhythmic efficiency of a man who could do this in his sleep. Leo bought a smoked ham quarter and a string of six sausages.

  The ham could be used for tonight's dinner with Ronan and Maren with plenty of left over. The sausages were because Leo had been thinking about them since the st trip and saw no reason to deny himself.

  "Your wife finally putting some meat on your bones?" Garron rumbled, wrapping the ham in waxed cloth. "A vilge man buying this much meat is an unusual sight."

  "She's trying."

  "Good woman. Tell her Garron says hello."