“Wait,” said Alfric as a man walked over to them. “Wilch?”
“Nah,” he said. “Wilch is my brother.” He shook his head. “Not even twins, and we get mistaken for each other all the time.” He held out a hand to Alfric. “You must be the up-and-comer. I got a guild message about you. Name’s Besc.”
Alfric shook hands. Besc had the same build as Wilch did, barrel-chested and a bit of fat on what were probably powerful arms. They were both mostly bald, with wild hair, a thick beard, and a wide nose that marked them as having Chelxic ancestry.
“Pleasure to meet you,” said Alfric. He looked around the yard. “We have two trees, but they might be a pain to get out, and any assistance you could give would be great.”
“And these trees,” said Besc, nodding, “they’d be the ones lodged up your butt?”
Verity burst out laughing, and Besc smiled at her, chuckling to himself. “Only a joke, only a joke,” he said. “Wilch told me about you, and I take the shots I see.”
“The trees are inside an extradimensional entad,” said Alfric, not quite sure how to deal with this sort of man. “You access it through a stone.”
“And how large are the trees, kworma?” asked Besc. It was a Chelxic word of affection, one of only a few that Alfric knew, and meant something like ‘friend’, though was used more casually.
Alfric held his arms out. “Three feet wide, about.”
Besc whistled. “A good haul then.”
“Hopefully,” said Alfric. It was quite a lot of wood, overshadowed by the bear but probably the most valuable thing in that dungeon. “They’re of the growth variety. You handle that here?”
Besc nodded. “Wilch probably told you we have a better setup here. This one is the family business, the one in Tarchwood was taken over by Wilch about ten years back. It’ll take time and effort, and growth is harder to process than the others, but I can handle it.”
“Getting it out of the stone is the first thing,” said Alfric. “It felt like a miracle that we were able to get them in, and I’ve been worried about whether or not we’d be able to extract them.”
He took his pack off and extracted the book, quickly flipping to the page that had the stone and then pulling it out. The stone itself was also heavy, but with the book, it wasn’t so bad. He set the stone down on the ground, thankful that it took a tiny mental push to activate, and looked at it for a moment. It was pale, with lots of vesicles. He touched it and felt himself transported to the garden, though he knew that he was still present in the normal world. The two trees were exactly where he’d left them, immense and probably impossible to move without cutting them up, which was a problem, given that you had to stay touching the stone in order to stay ‘in’ the garden. The trees were huge, a valuable find that they wouldn’t have been capable of removing without the stone, and it had only just barely been done, with this further complication.
It was the kind of thing that had attracted Alfric to dungeoneering, the same as the uncomfortably large wardrobe. He couldn’t quite explain what the appeal was.
“You can touch it,” Alfric said to Besc. “See what we’re dealing with.”
Besc moved forward and tentatively touched the stone, then kept his grip there for a moment. He stayed right where he was, but it was clear that he was looking around at things that the rest of them couldn’t see. He moved his hand from the stone, then stopped to look down at it.
“Well,” he said. “Any secrets to this stone, or is this what we’re working with?”
“You can bring in organic things,” said Hannah. “And take organic things out. Entads work, if they’re completely organic, and ectads work too. Not glass, not metal, not stones unless they’re unworked. You’ve got to keep your hand on the stone though, or you’ll end up out of the garden.”
Besc whistled to himself. “Thorny,” he said. “Chengu. But with what’s there, I see profit in it for both of us.” He let out a sigh.
“We’ll try getting the trees out the easy way first,” said Alfric. He looked around the area. “We should be able to put a tree along this road, if I can get it out. If I can’t, then I think we move on to raising it up high enough. The way we got the trees in was by momentarily ‘catching’ them as they fell.”
“Seems dangerous, kworma,” said Besc, rubbing his hairy chin.
That wasn’t the half of it, since Alfric had been working with Mizuki, and she was using whatever was available in the aether, namely, immense amounts of tightly focused fire. He’d been lucky she hadn’t killed him in the process.
Alfric picked up the stone and repositioned it so that if the first tree came out, it would be lying across the road, then went into the garden, made sure that it was lined up, and reached over to touch the tree. He tried to set his mind on it, to will it into his grip and bring it out.
This didn’t work, but Alfric hadn’t been optimistic enough to think it would.
“All right,” he said. “The easy way didn’t work.” He turned to Besc. “Do you have floatstones I can use?”
Besc grimaced. “I do, but what happens to them when they’re in that space? Besides, it’s a delicate operation, using them, and usually I’d have chains, but I don’t think that would be possible.”
“Ropes then?” asked Alfric. “They’re made of hemp or flax and should be fine to go through.”
“How much buoyancy would you need to lift one end of those?” asked Besc. “We’re probably talking in the hundreds of pounds, and that runs some real risks, especially with just rope to hold things down and a hand on the stone at all times.”
“A foot should work too,” said Hannah. “That would leave two hands free.”
“Ah, well,” said Besc. “Still a lot of problems to be solved there.” He stepped forward and placed his hand on the stone again, then put out a hand toward where the tree was in that other space. “My guess is fourteen thousand pounds, all told. That’s a rasan of raw material, but it’ll take quite some time to process. I can do, say, a thousand pounds a week, if that. And with two? That’s half a year of work.”
“He’s already trying’ to talk down the price,” said Hannah. “I can respect that, ay.”
“I can’t pay for it all,” said Besc, shaking his head. “Not at anywhere near a proper rate. Just being upfront, kworma. I can do the processing and pay you once I have the money coming in, but nearly thirty thousand pounds? Not sure who would handle this kind of thing, if not me. Wilch doesn’t have the equipment for it. That means you’d be going, oh, up to two hundred miles away, maybe more.”
“Probably all the way to Plenarch,” said Alfric, sighing. “Which we’d almost certainly need a portal for, and that will be down to timing, along with what’s probably a long hike.”
“We’re not in a rush, are we?” asked Hannah.
“No, we’re not,” said Verity. “So long as we can come collect in six months’ time, it seems like it would be fine.”
“I suppose,” said Alfric. “But we can’t do anything until the trees are out.” If they could get the trees out in the first place.
“Just making sure that we’re on the same page,” said Besc. “It would be a shame to do all this and then come to a disagreement once the labor is done. There’s the matter of terms,” he said. “The wood will take time to process, and the product—well, it would be better if I had a buyer for it before I started putting it into molds. Growthstone is good for a lot of things, but it’s best for dungeon plants. For something like this, not that a half-year job is usual, I’d take seventy percent.”