Chapter 70: The Cup Of Ashaleth

They agreed, of course. There was never really any doubt.

It took a little while to say it, because Thara said it twice and Orrin said it in three different tones, as if trying each on for size, and Nerissa said it with her chin up like a woman signing a death warrant for somebody she was fond of. Brannoch said “Mm,” and set his great square thumb on the page beside his X, so that there was, for the first time that day, a clear brown thumbprint on the charter of a guild. Veyra said it last, very quietly, with her violet eyes on the stamp.

And Marigold Tufton, with tears standing in her big black-rimmed eyes and her ears flat with emotion, brought the great stamp down.

It made a sound like a door closing in a very old and very deep house. The green seal of the Rotunda bloomed on the cream paper, round and perfect and glistening, and for a moment the whole dome seemed to hold its breath. Somewhere above, a canister rattled in its tube. A clerk on a ladder began, hesitantly, to clap, and was joined by another, and then by a gnome in the middle ring who had no idea what he was clapping for, and the noise rolled round the great circular room until even the troll with the receipt had put down his papers and was nodding, in slow, grave approval.

“It is done,” said Marigold, in a wobbling voice. “It is stamped. It is law. You are a chartered guild of the Rotunda of Dun Vurrim, with all the rights and privileges and obligations that go with it.” She blew her nose, with a great honk, into a handkerchief embroidered with small stamps. “You may enter the Pits. You may take contracts. You may sell your loot at the proper counters, at the proper rate, with the proper forms, in triplicate.”

“In triplicate,” said Thara, in awe.

“There is a very good reason for the triplicate.” Marigold folded the charter, and sealed it with a ribbon, and held it out across the desk with both paws, as one might hold out a newborn kitten. “It is yours. Guard it well. And now there is only one more small thing.”

It was the word small that did it. Fel felt the whole party go still, all at once, with the particular, weary, wary stillness of people who have been told before.

“How small?” said Fel.

“Very small,” said Marigold, brightly. “Almost nothing at all. You need a guild hall.”

For a moment nobody breathed.

Then, from seven separate throats, there rose a sound, which was neither a groan nor a sigh but something wonderfully in between, a long, low, exquisitely tired exhalation, like seven bellows being let down at once. Thara slid slowly down the front of the desk until she was sitting on the floor with her legs out in front of her. Orrin put a long hand over his eyes. Veyra said something in the old language, short and soft, that Fel had once heard her use on a very stubborn knot. The old man took off his battered hat, and looked into it, and put it back on again with the face of a person who has been told that a long-awaited bottle is empty.

“I knew there’d be a catch,” said Torren Ballast, to the ceiling.

“There is always a catch,” said Nerissa. “It is the single great law of civilization.”

“I thought we were done.” Thara’s voice came from the floor. “I thought, today, we were finished. I have been to a peacock. I have been slapped by a tortoise, a bit, in the abstract. I have seen a beetle eat twelve birds. I have signed my name, Marigold, twice.” She lifted a hand and let it fall. “I am a thief. I am not meant to do paperwork and real estate in the same week.”

“What kind of hall?” said Fel.

“Oh, don’t worry.” The little clerk had come round the desk, in a bustle of russet fur and rubber stamps, and was patting Thara’s shoulder with a small kind paw. “Please, don’t worry at all. It is much less terrible than it sounds. In fact, it is, I think, the most fun part. Everybody gets a little giddy, at this stage. They go and look at a building, and they say, oh, a staircase, and oh, what a lovely cellar, and then they are dreadfully happy for about a month.” Her ears tilted forward. “And you are in the most wonderful position, because there are a great many vacant halls.”

“Vacant?” said Veyra. She had lifted her head. “In a city this size? At the foot of the Pits?”

“It is the way of guilds, my dear.” Marigold climbed back up onto her stool, which brought her very nearly to eye level, and folded her paws. “They come and they go. Some stay for a hundred years, and some for a season. A guild will take a hall here in the spring, and go over the mountains in the summer, and be in Tarn Belgrave by the autumn, because there is a war on, or a plague, or a rumor of a very large dragon. They leave their halls and their keys and their old ledgers, and they come back in ten years, or twenty, or never. And the Rotunda holds the deeds in trust.” She smiled. “I have a drawer of them. It is a very sad drawer, and a very hopeful one.”

“There must be a catch to that,” said Thara, from the floor.

“There is no catch. There is only a reason.” And Marigold’s voice changed, a little, as if she were opening a door she had not opened for some time. “You see, this is not an ordinary hall. You have seen how large it is. Have you not wondered why?”

Fel had wondered. He had wondered it on the first day, standing under the great bell with his mouth open, with the whole shining vault of the Hall of a Hundred Guilds going up around him like the inside of a cathedral built for giants. He had counted the doors along the walls, the hundred great gilded doors of the hundred guild offices, and he had tried to imagine what kind of crowd could possibly fill them.

“It’s too big,” he said slowly. “For the number of guilds that are actually here.”

“By a great deal.” Marigold looked pleased. “It is not one hall at all. Did you know that? It is a district, with a roof of its own. The Great Hall is only the front hall of it, and behind it, in the long streets of the Guild Wards, there are a hundred and eight guild halls. Houses, towers, barracks, a few chapels. In an ordinary year, perhaps forty are occupied. The rest are shut, and swept, and waiting.” She leaned her chin on her paw. “And they wait for one thing. The Cup.”

“The Cup,” said Veyra, very softly.

“The Sacred Cup of Ashaleth.”

She said it as another person might say the name of a saint. The little russet face had gone dreamy, and a little distant. Beyond her, in the roar and bustle of the Rotunda, the canisters whistled overhead, but there was a kind of hush around the desk now, as if the words had a weight of their own.

“It is a tournament,” said Marigold. “A very great one. The greatest in the Realms. Every thirty-three years, in the first month of the year, the guilds of all the nations gather in Dun Vurrim, to meet in the Hall of Champions at the top of the right mountain. They come by road, and by sea, and by sky. They come from Tarn Belgrave and the Salt Coast and the Drowned Reach and every other place with a name. They fight in the great arena, one guild against another, in a tournament of a hundred and one days. There are rules, and a great many rituals, and a very old man who blows a horn.” Her ears twitched. “And at the end, one guild remains.”

“And that is why the Hall is so large,” said Orrin, slowly.

“That is why. It was built for the Cup, a thousand years ago, and it has been waiting for it ever since. When the Cup comes, every hall in the Wards is filled. Every one. The streets are full of banners. You cannot find a bed for love or money. You cannot buy a loaf of bread without a queue.” She sighed. “I have a cousin who rents out her coal cellar. And a guild that comes in the week of the Cup, and wants a hall? There is nothing. There has not been a single vacant room in the Wards, on the first day of the Cup, in nine hundred years.”

Nobody said anything.

It was Brannoch, in the end, who spoke. He had stood throughout, with his arms folded, silent as a boundary stone, and now he lifted his big head and looked at the little clerk with an unreadable heaviness.

“When?” said Brannoch.

“The next one?” Marigold’s voice grew lighter, and rounder, and almost shy. “The first month of next year. It will be thirty-three years, to the day.” She spread her paws. “We shall see, I suppose, if you are still here.”

If you are still here. Fel heard it, and he saw the others hear it, too, and for a moment he saw the whole long road ahead of them, with its dungeons and its dark and its hundred small and large catastrophes, strung out like lanterns toward a date that was, after all, not so very far away. Nobody said anything about it. But Veyra’s hand, on the strap of her bow, tightened until the knuckles went white.

“I was at the last one,” said Torren Ballast.

They turned. He was sitting on the arm of a bench, with Maude across his knees and his hat in his lap, looking at nothing, and the cheer had gone from his face again, replaced by something wide and old and complicated.

“Thirty-three years ago,” he said. “I was a young man. I was magnificent. I stood in the Hall of Champions, up on the top of the right mountain, with a hundred thousand people roaring. I did not fight.” He smiled, a little crookedly. “I was the gate-warden, that year. I held the doors. And I’ll tell you, boy. It was the best seat in the house.”

“You never told me that!” said Marigold. She had gone pink to the tips of her ears. “I was there! I was nine years old! I was on my uncle’s shoulders! I saw the final bout!”

“Did you? Well, there you are. We may have passed in the crowd.”

“The final bout,” said Marigold, in a hushed voice, to the rest of them, clasping her paws. “It was between the last two guilds standing. I will not say their names. It does not matter, they are not here now, and anyway, it would not be proper to say, it would spoil it.” She drew a breath. “But you should have seen it. There was fire, and there was a wall of ice as tall as a house, and a woman in silver who fought with no weapons at all. The whole mountain shook. And at the end, when it was over, when the winner stood in the dust, they came down the aisle with the prize. The bottle.”

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“Bottle?” said Thara, who had been sitting on the floor with an expression of distant boredom, and now sat up so quickly she banged her head against the desk.

“The winner of the Cup receives an authentic bottle of Ashaleth.”

It was a moment before anyone spoke. It was Veyra, in the end, who said, with great care:

“I have heard of it.”

“Of course you have.” Marigold had put both paws to her face. “Everyone has. It is the oldest wine in the world. Some say it is not wine at all. They say it was made in the first spring, from the first grapes, in the garden of a god. They say that one sip will heal the sick, and one cup will make a king weep, and a whole bottle…” She stopped, and her great dark eyes went very far away. “They carried it down the aisle in a case of glass. On a cushion. It was the color of an evening sky, and there was a light in it, a little gold light, turning, and the whole crowd went silent. Every single person. I remember it perfectly.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I have thought about it, every day, for thirty-three years. I have dreamed of it. I have never, never tasted it. And I don’t suppose that I ever shall.”

Nobody said anything for a time. The canisters shot overhead. And Fel looked at the small russet clerk, at her bright ears and her round ink-stained fingers and her hopeful, foolish, passionate face, and he felt something shift in him, something that had been, until that moment, merely a promise to find a roof.

“We’ll win it,” said Thara.

The words came out before she knew she had said them. She had gone red, and stared at her own boots, and added, rather quickly: “I mean, in theory. If we… in some other year. I only mean that it would be funny.”

“It would,” said Torren Ballast, very gently.

“Oh, you are all dears,” said Marigold, and blew her nose again, and then, with an obvious and heroic effort, wiped her eyes and put on her spectacles and became a clerk once more. “Well! That is quite enough of that. Now, you wanted a hall. I think I have exactly the thing.”

◆

It was in the Guild Wards, a quarter of an hour from the Rotunda, on a crooked cobbled street that rose gently toward the foot of the left mountain.

Fel had expected the Wards to be grand, and they were. They were also strange. Under the great glass vault, which was lit from above by a pale and endless daylight, as though the sun had been persuaded to come indoors, the long streets ran between tall houses of black timber and grey stone. They were built in a style Fel did not have a name for, but which he would learn to call Dwarven Gothic: high steep gables, leaded windows, carved doors, great curving buttresses of stone that leaned against the wood like a mother’s hand. Some of them were shuttered. Some had gardens. Every second doorway had a hanging sign, in iron or painted wood, that groaned gently in an unfelt breeze, and most of the signs were blank.

It was quiet. It was the kind of quiet that you find in a church, or a library, or a very old forest. Their footsteps rang on the cobbles, and a loose shutter somewhere banged, once.

“It is a little further,” said Marigold. She had insisted on coming herself, with her skirts gathered in one paw and a ring of keys the size of a dinner plate in the other, and had left, with an air of serene authority, her whole desk in the care of a nervous junior called Hemlock. “It was only handed back to the Rotunda this morning. I have not even had time to put up the sign. The last guild left it, as they do, in rather a hurry. They had a letter from the south.” She dropped her voice. “I do not like to gossip.”

“You love to gossip,” said Thara.

“I love it terribly,” Marigold agreed. “But I will not tell you who. It is not my place. There is a very strict rule, and I am a very serious clerk.” She paused. “They had a cat.”

They turned a corner, and the street opened into a little cobbled square with a dry fountain in the middle. And Marigold stopped, and lifted her paw, and said, with a faint and trembling pride:

“Number Thirteen, Lampwick Close.”

Nobody spoke.

It stood at the head of the square, with its back against the foot of the mountain, as though it had grown there. It was very tall. It had been built, as far as Fel could tell, of a dark wood that was nearly black with age, and of a grey stone the color of rain, and the two had been set together with a kind of loving precision, timber framing stone and stone bracing timber, so that the whole house seemed to lean, tenderly, on itself. It had three stories and an attic. It had a steep roof of dark slate, with a row of little carved gargoyles along the eaves, each of them, Fel realized after a moment, a different weathered beast: a wolf, an owl, a stag, a very small dragon, and, at the far corner, with great affection, a beetle. It had a great carved door of black oak, studded with iron, under a pointed arch, flanked by two slender pillars like folded wings. Leaded windows, narrow and tall, glinted along the front like the eyes of some gentle, watchful animal. A little bell tower sat on the roof, with a small green copper bell, and a weathercock in the shape of an iron lantern.

It was a beautiful house. It was also, quite clearly, deeply tired.

The green had come up between the cobbles of the yard. The ivy had made a great dark mantle over the west wall, and the weathercock hung at a drunken angle, and a single leaded pane, high above the door, had gone. But the lines of it, the great, dark, patient bones of the thing, were as straight and strong as the day it was built, and Fel, standing in the square with the old keys jingling and the light falling soft and pale on the slate, felt a thing that he had not felt since he was very small, and had stopped expecting to feel again.

It was the feeling of a place that was waiting for somebody.

“Oh,” said Orrin.

“It is very fine,” said Veyra, in a careful voice, and then, in a lower one, “it is more than fine.”

“It’s a church,” said Torren Ballast, with deep suspicion. “Somebody’s sold us a church.”

“It is a guild hall, Master Ballast, in the old Gothic style, with all the proper facilities.” Marigold had gone to the door, and was fitting a key the length of her forearm into a lock the size of a loaf of bread. “You will find that everything is excellent. The structure is sound. The roof is sound, mostly. There are four floors, and a cellar, and a very good chimney.” The key turned, with a deep, satisfying, iron clunk. “There are eleven sleeping rooms, which is quite enough for seven, and some change. There is a kitchen, with a proper range. There is a great hall, a bar, an office, a library, a strong room, which has a safe, and a drying yard for washing. And,” she added, with an air of saving the best for last, “there is a stable.”

She turned, and pointed with her whole arm.

It stood to the right of the house, across a small walled yard, a long, low, stone-and-timber building with a high, steep roof and a pair of great double doors, wide enough for a wagon. It had been a stable. It had been built, once, for the great dray-horses of some long-gone, long-forgotten merchant, and it had loft doors above, and a hayloft, and a trough, and an old iron ring set in the wall at the height of a very large animal’s head.

All of them looked at it. And then, as one person, they looked at Thara, who had a very strange look on her face.

“It’s got doors,” she said, in a hollow voice.

“Doors,” said Fel.

“Big doors. Beetle-sized doors.” She turned to Brannoch, her eyes alight. “Brannoch. Brannoch, he can live indoors. He can have a roof. He will never sleep in a ditch again.”

Brannoch did not answer. He had walked across the yard, quietly, with his great slow tread, and laid a hand on the old oak frame of the stable door, and he stood there for a long moment with his head bowed. When he turned round, his face was as impassive as ever, but it was wet.

“It is good,” said Brannoch.

It was, Fel thought, the best review he had ever heard of anything.

◆

The price, when it came, was an anticlimax.

They did the business in the great hall, which was a vast dim room with a ceiling of black rafters that rose like the ribs of a ship, and a hearth at one end so big that Thara could, and did, stand upright in it. Marigold had produced the deed from a case of brass, and unrolled it on a long oak table under a layer of dust, and laid out her pens. It was a good deal shorter than the charter. It said, in a firm black hand, that the building known as Number Thirteen, Lampwick Close, with its yard, its stable, its well, its fixtures and appurtenances, and all rights therein, would be conveyed to the holders of a duly chartered guild, upon payment of the sum of eleven hundred glims.

“Eleven hundred,” said Veyra. She read it twice. “It is a fortune.”

“It is the cheapest hall in the Wards,” said Marigold, apologetically. “It would be three thousand, in the ordinary way. But it has been sitting, in the last week, and the Rotunda would very much prefer to see a hall occupied than empty. An empty hall is a sad thing.” She dropped her voice. “It is also rather old. It has not been aired in some years. I should be honest. It will need a certain amount of…”

“I’ll pay it,” said Torren Ballast.

They all stared at him. He had taken from the inside of his coat a purse the size of a small cabbage, and, with the air of a man performing a conjuring trick, he turned it upside down over the table. A tide of gold and silver rolled out, glims and half-glims and a great many very old coins that had not been legal tender for two hundred years, and heaped up on the dusty oak.

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Torren. “I’ve been a Diamond for forty-one years. I haven’t spent a lot of it. I was mostly buying drink, and drink,” he added, with some bitterness, “is cheap in the Tankard.” He counted, with a thick finger, in short, careful bursts, and pushed the pile across. “There you are. Eleven hundred. And a bit over for the clerk, for the trouble.”

“Oh, no, I could not possibly, it is against the…” Marigold’s paw closed on the extra coins without any visible volition. “It is very irregular.”

She signed. He signed, in a hand like a bear writing with a chisel. Marigold applied the great stamp, with a rubbery thump, and blew gently on the ink. And the deed lay on the oak, between the seven of them and the dust, and it was, quite simply, real.

Fel looked round the vast old hall. He looked at the ceiling of black rafters, and the hearth like a cave, and the tall windows full of pale light, and the seven faces gathered round the table, tired, grubby, a little stunned. He had been sleeping in barns and ditches for most of his life. He had never in his life owned a house, or a key, or a roof, and the feeling was so odd and so large that for a moment he could hardly think.

“It’s ours,” he said.

“It is ours,” said Thara, and began, very softly, to laugh.

◆

It was Nerissa who found the cobwebs.

She had gone up the broad stair at the back of the great hall, with her silver hair drifting and her long skirts held away from the dust, and stopped on the first landing. And from the top of the stairs there came a long, calm, appalled silence.

“Torren,” said Nerissa. “You will want to see this.”

They all went up.

It was not dirty. It was not, Fel thought, dirty at all, in the way that a gutter was dirty, or a battlefield. There was no rot, no damp, no smell of decay. But the whole of the house had been left. It had been left, quite gently, by people who had expected to be back, for a very long time, and time had come into it, as time does, and laid a soft grey hand on everything. The dust lay thick as felt on every sill and stair. The cobwebs hung in long fine curtains from the beams, and swayed a little as they passed. In the sleeping rooms, the furniture stood under white sheets, like rows of patient ghosts. In the kitchen, a row of copper pots hung green and dull above a range that had not been lit in a year. The bar was a long stretch of black oak with a row of dusty bottles behind it and a single glass, set out, as if somebody had been called away in the middle of a thought. The library had a ladder and a thousand books, and the books, when Orrin lifted one, gave a small, sad sigh of dust.

They went through it all, floor on floor, with the light falling in dim pale bars from the leaded windows and their footprints marking the dust behind them. And when they had come, at last, to the end of it, and gathered again in the great hall, nobody said anything for a time.

It was Veyra who spoke first. She had pushed back her sleeves.

“We should clean it,” she said.

“Now?” said Thara.

“Today. All of it.” She looked at the dim, dust-furred hall, and her jaw set. “I will not sleep tonight in a house that has not been aired. We have a hall. It is ours. It deserves to be lived in.”

“I would like it noted that I am very much in favor,” said Orrin. “I only wish to observe that it is a great deal of house.”

“Then we shall begin at the top, and work down,” said Nerissa. She had already drawn a ribbon from her sleeve and was tying back her hair, and the tiny movement of the silver curls under the knot had the quick, deft, businesslike air of a woman about to get to work. “And we will do it properly. Windows, then floors, then the linen. I have a great many cloths. And Thara will go and find a bucket.”

“Why me?” said Thara.

“Because you were the first to complain.”

And that, in the end, was how the Seven Sorrows spent the first day of their existence: not in a dungeon, or a duel, or a tavern, but in a great, cold, dusty house on Lampwick Close, with their sleeves rolled up and a very large number of buckets.

Marigold, who had other duties, said her farewells at the door. She kissed Thara on both cheeks, and shook Orrin’s hand with both of hers, and told Brannoch gravely that he was to come and see her if he needed any forms. She told Fel, in a very small voice, to be careful. And then she pressed into his hand a small brass key on a green ribbon, and ran off down the cobbles, with her ears flat, without looking back.

Fel looked at the key.

It was the key to the front door. It was, as it turned out, the only one that worked.