“What is the purpose of your visit?” the first guard asked.
“Trade,” Greg responded.
“Where are you coming from?” the guard asked.
“The Heights,” Greg answered.
“Who is your leader?” the guard asked.
“Greg Atwater,” Greg responded.
The second guard held a structure notebook in one hand. He was paging through it looking for the suburb's name. When he found it he double checked the leader's name.
“Looks like you're paid up,” the second guard said. “Your quarterly taxes are due in thirty days.”
“We will have it,” Greg assured the second guard.
The guards let their small party through. Neither noticed that there were four of them, unlike the usual three. They all kept their heads down and walked quickly through the gallery. As members of a tiny suburb they didn’t have any intention of catching the eye of power. They hurried away from the leadership offices on the east side and headed directly to downtown where they could sell their leather.
It was the same leatherworker Irene sold her bear hides to on her last visit. She let the don’t notice me spell drop and greeted the proprietor.
“Hello John. How is business?” she asked the leather worker. She held her own slightly smaller bundle of leather separate from the rest of her group’s.
“Fair,” John replied. “Londontown has started sending patrols out into our green, so all the hunters are upgrading to leather armor. Did you bring me any bear hides?“
“Straight from Waymarket,” Irene responded.
“They have bears there?” John asked.
“The next line of greens to the south are heavy with them,” Irene explained.
As Greg and John fell into their price negotiations, Irene thought about what John said. Patrolling the green north of Chicago seemed like an odd thing for Londontown to do. They would literally have to go around Chicago to get there. If someone was roving the green it seemed far more likely to her that it was an affiliated square to the north, like Paris. She didn’t hear anything about patrols inside Chicago territory in Londontown. She needed to swing by Paris on the way back.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come back with us?” Greg asked after he finished his price negotiations with John.
“Yeah,” Irene responded. “I am on my way north to see the squares there.” Irene hugged Greg and wished him a safe journey home. Greg returned the sentiment, before his party headed off to buy supplies with the coins they earned from the leather.
She negotiated with John for the bear hides. He was paying fifty percent higher than last year. John tried to sell her a set of light leather armor to replace the worn set she was wearing. Irene demurred, but she did look at her clothing and decided she needed to craft herself a new set.
Irene browsed through the shops looking for any new products. The weapons dealers were all heavy on blades and war hatchets. Elie, the blacksmith, was selling a breastplate and backplate in dark iron. She displayed them on a dummy over the top of a cloth quilted shirt. Irene thought the armor would restrict the wearer's range of arm motion. She wasn’t certain why she would want to wear it.
“How much?” Irene asked the young boy that was keeping his eye on the armor. He was probably Elie’s son. There were so many children running around all the settlements, Irene stopped trying to keep track of them years ago.
“Twenty five silver,” the boy said. Irene hoped she kept a straight face. That was very steep. It was about equivalent to the rent on an inn room for half a year. She moved on.
The main crafters in Chicago were doing well. There was an increase in the manufacture of heavy weapons and armor. Irene realized it was a war economy. She suspected the cost of vegetables was going to increase as gatherers switched to scavenging to supply the war manufacturing.
Usually Irene made a trade or two with the smaller crafters in the cross halls. Since she carried the heavy pack of bear hides from Londontown she didn’t have many more physical items on her. She went off to find the prize altar where she could pull some items out of her digital inventory.
The public prize altar was not where it was on her last trip. It was in a room off a cross corridor. A long line of scavengers were waiting.
“What is the rate?” Irene asked the woman in line in front of her.
“One silver flat fee, plus one in ten, rounded up,” the woman responded.
“What do you mean rounded up?” Irene asked, stunned at the high rate.
“If you pull out one iron scrap they will take it from you. If you pull out eleven they will take two. So be careful to only take out sets of ten,” the woman advised. Ten wasn’t an easy number to pull out of inventory. The structures systems were all based on a base six number system written in an almost roman numeral style. Anything past thirty six gave Irene a headache.
“I am from a registered suburb,” Irene countered.
“You should have pulled your inventory out in the wilds and carried it in. Everyone pays at the altar, it is a war tax.” Irene ended up stepping out of line. The lesser crafters would have to survive without her scrap. She hoped Greg didn’t get burned by this tax. The Heights main product was tanned skins, but they picked up and sold any scrap they found along the way. She kept her eye out for him and his group as she made her way to the northern exit. She didn’t see him before she reached the northern stairs.
She thought about making one last loop of Chicago looking for him. He could be anywhere from inside a shop to paying his suburb’s quarterly tax. Greg lived in the structure longer than Irene. He came in with the first exploration teams. She decided she was being paranoid and Greg was capable of taking care of himself.
She cast camouflage and slipped past the guards inspecting the gathering bags of a hunter just returning. She slipped into the stairwell hugging the wall in an effort to not bump into the line of waiting hunters. The line extended as far as she could see down in the direction of the nearest green. Irene made the decision to go up. She found an easy route north to the next line of greens on the upper levels when she traveled with Mary. The level above was little different to any other in the structure. The hall’s closed and broken doors ran off into the distance. The number of broken doors was higher than on the lower floors.
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Directly across from the exit on the floor above, Irene was surprised to find an inscription in Polygon. Irene studied the inscription. It was composed of zeros, ones, threes and fives. She didn’t have any idea what spell it represented. With that many symbols it was at least a tier three spell. The Polygon script indicated tier four. She looked it over carefully and narrowed her eyes at it.
She studied it so intently that her interface light began to flash in a corner of her vision. She blinked it away. With a sigh she gave up on the inscription and turned northwest.
As she worked her way north she heard voices from ahead. The door to a nearby room was broken. The door looked as if it was shredded by giant claws. Since she could see through the opening to the inside, it was fairly safe to step inside. She made sure her camouflage spell was still on her and ducked into the room, standing out of the way of the swing of the door remnants just in case the passersby were interested in clearing the room.
“I think we missed it,” a blur in the hallway said. Irene realized they were using cloaking spells of their own, although obviously not muffle. She kept her eyes on the blur. It coalesced into a warrior in blue touched leathers as Control recognized that she saw the movement and found in her favor. It meant her tier and skill in the spell was higher than the caster.
“Did you check the map?” another man’s voice asked. His voice came from farther back down the hall. Cloaking spell or not, Irene could not see him from her position next to the wall.
“It’s not on my map anymore. I think this whole area has changed. The only staircase I see ahead is the one leading to Chicago. I don’t think we want that one,” the man within Irene’s vision commented. She could see him looking at this virtual map. Irene rarely used the map system. The structure was constantly changing. The only things with any permanence were the greenspaces and settled squares. Irene traveled so much her map was always out of date. She relied on her memory most of the time. She was pretty good at navigating the halls by dead reckoning. She used how the floor, wall and ceiling tiles were laid at intersections to decipher the direction of travel.
“Well damn,” the second voice commented. “If we head east from here we will be over the green. Let's head west and see if we can catch one farther away.”
There was some discussion of this plan by four or five voices, at least one of which was female. The group turned around and headed back the direction they came from.
Carefully and quietly Irene slid to the floor. She didn’t want to catch up with them. Chicago was solidly red. Those blue touched leathers were a clear indication that this was the Londontown patrol John mentioned. The fact that Chicago hunters were armoring up because of these patrols did not bode well for their intentions. The patrol leader said if they went east they would be over the greenspace. Irene didn’t think that was strictly true. She was pretty certain east of here was the top of the green, where the greenspace’s high ceiling blocked all travel.
She decided she would also turn around. She would go back to the Chicago stairs and wait for the hunters to clear them. It was getting late in the day, everyone would want to be inside the boundary by nightfall. Instead of staying the night in a rest or securing a room she would stay in a tree. She preferred that to a secure room anyway. She could use the opportunity to fill her water supplies.
Irene waited ten minutes before slipping out of the room. Still under camouflage she retraced her steps to the Chicago stairwell. A glance down the stairwell showed it was still filled with hunters.
The inscription taunted her as she sat down with her back to the wall opposite. The whole situation here seemed so much worse than in Londontown. Was she too distracted by her new business? Irene didn’t think so. Anthony did mention the increasing tax and Christopher was checking the night guards, but both of those actions seemed so minor compared to what was happening here. She decided to give up thoughts of a fast run up to Moscow. If she went north from here, she could circle around Chicago’s tax stations and visit Paris.
She held still so long her interface light was blinking again. Looking for a way to pass the time, Irene herded the light into the center of her vision. Her interface opened to overlay her vision. It opened on a different screen than usual. Surprised, Irene jerked and her interface closed automatically.
It took her a few moments to open it again. It opened on the usual screen, only the interface wasn’t being rendered in the same structure font as the last time she viewed it. When she last looked at it all the numbers were written in Arabic, now they were in Polygon. Polygon was a tier four font. Her interface being rendered in it meant she was tier four.
Now that was a development. She wondered when it happened. She tried to think of anything that stood out. She wondered if tier four was why she was given the opportunity to buy the shop and not just rent it. She would have to ask around. If it was, maybe she actually hit tier four last season. Bear hunting with the team out of Moscow did make more sense than killing rats and gathering furniture. Or did it? It seemed like Control loved variety.
She needed to review the list of tier four spells she had gathered hints on and pick one to start working on. She started to reach for her notebook. Her movement caused her interface to close again. She remembered that flicker of a different screen. She thought about what she was doing differently the first time she opened the interface.
She was looking at the inscription when she opened it the first time. She reopened the interface while staring off down the hall. A thrill ran down her spine as she considered why the interface would respond differently depending upon what she was looking at. She locked her gaze on the inscription and waited for her interface light to start blinking.
In a pretty extreme act of stupidity, Irene stayed in the hallway the entire night with her interface open for most of it. Everyone knew the fastest way to die in the structure was to stay unprotected in a hallway at night. The second fastest way was to use your interface in an unsecured location. She dismissed the interface and cast chain lightning in the direction of any approaching sound. Everytime she did it, she thought about securing a room and resting for the rest of the night. She always made some excuse that she would do that in just a minute after she tried just one more thing.
She solved the decryption shortly after full light. The inscription was a tier four cloaking spell. Irene suspected it cloaked light, heat, sound and scent in a single cast. She knew a tier three cloak that masked light and heat. She didn’t find it that useful, it took more energy to hold and very few things in the structure tracked by heat. She usually just cast the tier two camouflage which masked the light reflected from the caster’s body, or their image. This new tier four spell was essentially camouflage and muffle together with extra’s.
The spell wasn’t really that important. The incredible thing was that she decrypted it with her interface. It meant that even though she lost the use of the Speedwell’s computers she could still use the inscriptions to discover new spells. After Irene dismissed her interface, the decrypted version of the inscription remained on the wall. She rose to her feet and ran her fingers across the wall. She could still feel the inscribed symbols on the wall under the image.
She stretched trying to work the stiffness out of her neck and shoulders. In the increased illumination from the light panels, Irene could see an excess of dead animals in both directions down the hall. There were rats, badgers, hall spiders and even one cougar. Looking at the carnage she dealt out during the night Irene felt bad at the waste. She didn’t have to stay in the hall all night. She should have gone back down to Chicago and rented a pallet for the night. All these animals could have continued on living their lives, although it didn’t really work that way. Control bred and raised the animals someplace else and just brought them in to kill or be killed. If Control didn’t send them after her last night, it would have sent them against someone else today. Irene wasn’t completely certain they were real animals and not some kind of biological machines. They didn’t seem to have very many animal instincts.
Irene pulled her knife and moved to the first carcass out of guilt. She would sell the hides to John. If they were still here when she got back she'd haul back some of the badger meat to sell to the butcher. She’d use the rats for the entry tax.