“No,” said Isra. She almost seemed like she would leave it at that. “My parents immigrated from Tarbin, and I was born near Pucklechurch.”
“Ah,” replied Mergan. “Well, I’ll welcome you all the same. Good to have a local, to keep the city folk in line. You can feel free to look around while we talk about business. It’s mostly henlings and some dungeon art.” Isra stayed where she was while Mergan turned back to Alfric. “The books, then?”
Alfric pulled out the storage book and began removing the mundane books from it, stacking them up on the counter one by one. At first, Mergan just watched, but as it became clear just how long this process was going to take, he began looking through the books. He checked the spines first, then leafed through, though Alfric had no idea what he might be looking for. Once a hundred books had been removed, set into stacks of ten, Mergan used a key to open a small box on the counter and pulled out a monocle with a green lens, which he used to look at the books, largely focusing on their spines.
“About half of these are recipe books,” said Mergan. “Those are only worth the paper and the binding, raw material for some kind of magic or another. The recipes have measurements no one’s ever heard of, ingredients that might mean anything, all kinds of problems that make them a curiosity and nothing more. I think I’ve sold two over twenty years running this place.”
“That’s a shame,” said Alfric, who was continuing to pull out more books. He was going to be happy to see the end of this particular transaction. If the books turned out not to be worth much, there was little he could do about it.
“It’s the same for instruction books, manuals, all kinds of things,” said Mergan. “Gardening books for fruits and flowers that don’t exist, using tools that you’d have to make special, from someone who’s got different ideas about what soil is like, that kind of thing. Not all entirely worthless, but close to it, and hard to find a buyer.”
“What about the rest?” asked Alfric.
“Well, I can tell you what I’m looking for,” said Mergan as he flipped through more of them. “I’m looking for stories, I’m looking for books with illustrations, I’m looking for sciences, I’m looking for magic. The two biggest markets for dungeon books are, broadly, entertainment and education.” He stopped in the middle of flipping through one particular book and gave it a closer look, then set it over to one side. “The problem here is that I’m both the appraiser and the buyer, which isn’t a good situation for you, and I don’t want to put you at a disadvantage, because as I’ve said, I like up-and-comers bringing their finds to me. Now, you’ve got two options. The first is that you just trust that I’m a good guy, which I don’t think I’d do, if I were you. You’d appraise them yourselves, obviously, but respectfully, you have no idea. The second option is that you bring someone in to take a look.” He had been looking through the books as he talked and setting aside perhaps one in every twenty of them. “Now, options are limited in Tarchwood, and so far as I know, there are only two or three people who’d be qualified to check my estimations. The entad shop, that’s run by a husband-and-wife couple, but they trade in henlings and such too. The wife, that’s Eddel, she’s got a head for numbers, and I’m sure she’d be willing to take a look and maybe give you a counteroffer, if you want to fetch her.”
Alfric nodded. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll go get her,” he said.
“Of course,” said Mergan.
“I’ll stay with the books,” said Isra. There was distrust in her voice, and Alfric didn’t like that, not when it was so obvious. They had just met this man, Mergan, but from what he knew of small towns, the proprietors had too much to risk if they tried to swindle or cheat someone.
He took off, hoping that she would be okay on her own.
Chapter 10 — Second Breakfast
After finishing the dungeon, Hannah was left feeling a bit rootless. She hadn’t quit the temple, because she’d said that she would still help out from time to time when the dungeons weren’t calling, and Lemmel, the older cleric of the Church of Symmetry, had graciously allowed her to keep her room until she found some other lodging. So after an exciting time in a dungeon with a promising party, she found herself right back where she’d started the day before. There was nothing to show for the adventure, because she was waiting on Alfric to sell it all, and she hadn’t gotten an entad out of the dungeon, which was a bit of a disappointment. It would be another six days before the party channel opened up, so she couldn’t even talk to the others, not without physically tracking them down, and both Alfric and Isra would be gone for at least a day, maybe two. The one thing she had, the sole proof that she’d been in that dungeon, was the key with a raccoon on it, but that could hold her attention for only so long.
“Alfric seems a good sort,” she said to Lemmel. “Hardheaded, but that’s what you need sometimes, and a bit of a goof when it comes to people, or at least these people, ay? Too rigid, is my thinkin’, where what he should be is generous and friendly. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is if you treat people like friends, then friends is what they’ll end up bein’. What he shoulda done, when we finished, was to take us to the tavern and buy a round of drinks, and I know you’re thinkin’ that if I thought that was somethin’ that needed doin’, it’s somethin’ I shoulda done myself, but a party can’t have two leaders, ay, the math doesn’t work, and I never fancied leadin’ anyway. I just wish that he were better at it.”
“I hope that it works out for you,” said Lemmel, which was the kind of empty-headed nothing he was always saying. It was kind and polite, but it wasn’t helpful, if it was meant to be. Words always seemed to come out of his head like mud from a pipe, which wasn’t to say that he was a bad sort, just that he was quite dull.
“There was a sermon I was plannin’, which I guess I won’t do now, about reflection, ay?” asked Hannah. “There’s a line in the Book of Garam Ashar, ‘We find ourselves reflected in others, and reflect them into ourselves’, section two, verse seven. My thinkin’ is that how we should look at people, the best way of it, is to stick ourselves in their shoes to see how things would look from their perspective, and then stick them in our shoes to see how they’d do things different, ay? So I was thinkin’ on Alfric and what it might be like if we reflected into each other’s shoes, and I think I’d do a better job than he’s done so far, no offense to him, because I have a better handle on what the others want, what helps keep a party together, ay?”
“Perhaps,” nodded Lemmel.
“I think most people don’t really like being solitary,” said Hannah. “From the Book of Garam Ashar, ‘A person has only one symmetry of his own, the left reflecting the right, which leaves asymmetry of the front and back that can only be rectified by the addition of others’, section one, verse three. Alfric selected solitary people, picked those not in a party and young enough that we might be without connections, so my thinkin’ is that the best thing to bind us together as a party is the fact that mostly we don’t want to be alone. Bein’ without a party can be rough in a lot of ways, not havin’ someone to talk to whenever you want, bein’ cut out of conversations, things like that. So if I were him, I’d be tryin’ to knit us together without even talkin’ about the dungeons at all, tryin’ to make sure that we all knew we could rely on each other, that we would be friends and support each other more than just in the dungeons. Now, I can’t speak for them, and can barely speak about them, but Verity seems like she came here runnin’ from somethin’, same as Alfric. Mizuki and Isra, if I had to say, were both abandoned, which is altogether a different sort of thing, and that’s just me sayin’ that, but it’s probably close to the truth. I’ve seen Isra a few times, healed her leg once, and when she comes into market, she’s always alone. The leg injury? My guess is if she had someone, they’d have come with her, though I might be wrong. And Mizuki’s not so much abandoned, I s’pose, since she chose to stay behind, but I have to imagine it gets lonely in that big house. She’s friendly, but I don’t know that she has many friends.”