Loyalties define your character.

Wisdom of the Ancients, book 2

New Sandusky looked somehow like home, Johanna thought. And why not? Even if she had stayed there for less than a month in cumulative time, it was a promise of home or at least an apartment waiting for her instead of an inn room or a tent.

She’d sworn to herself that she would take her time… but she suspected the world would somehow conspire to interfere with her plans. The world, or maybe Georgy North.

The banker was literally waiting for them when they reached the gates of the city. With a huge smile plastered on his face.

“I knew you could do it.”

“What makes you think we did it?” she had to ask.

“Everyone’s there. If you had to turn because it was too hard, you’d be back earlier. If you found nothing, same thing. You’re back just after you should have finished your provisions without resupply, so you stayed as long as possible. Ergo…”

“Checking on your investment, then,” she noted.

“It’s not an investment. Well, technically not, since I’m loaning you money with interest, instead of relying on returns. But you have found your parchments. How many crates do you have?”

“How many crates of parchments do you have?”

“Seven. Almost twenty thousand per crate. And we have one more with nearly three hundred varied books for dedicated conversion,” she confirmed.

“Conversion of what? Wait, that’s how you made Talents for your salvagers?”

“Yes. I told you we were getting them… the truth is, we create them out of Ancient books. The books are there if we need a specific set made, but that’s not truly necessary. So, let’s go and secure them.”

The two wagons got parked next to the Talent House headquarters. The crates weighed less than she’d expected, given the amount of paper they held. Individually, the parchments seemed to be some odd artifact-like paper, but it seemed the paper was in fact not truly paper.

The crates still weighed a lot, but the salvagers teamed to move them, and they finally moved the crates upstairs. The much-heavier book crate stayed on the ground floor, though. While Ancient books were expensive after all, those were not as precious as the converted parchments.

“We need to hire those guards now,” Johanna noted. “There was little point in having some twiddling their thumbs for three months, but now that we’ve brought the parchments back…”

“Do we provide them with Talents?” Peter asked.

She was startled at the question. Truth was, she still thought of the Talents as something rare and precious, even if she intellectually knew she had hundreds of thousands of parchments available.

Empowered guards made sense. If someone wanted to burgle them, they would be much better at dealing with hostile intruders if they had Talents. But it also complicated the recruitment process. Someone with a set of ranged Heroic Talents, or destructive magic fire would be powerful, but ill-suited as an indoor guard. And key abilities, like healing, were good in battle outdoors, but more limited indoors.

Come to think of it, would Succor, the teleport-to-wounded Talent work across floors? She made a mental note to check. Laura was still the only one with it, but they probably had a hundred of those available for the right person.

“You are right,” she finally answered her friend.

“We’ll probably find a proper set of Talents. But it all depends on what their baseline is,” she added.

“Don’t we have a guide now?”

“For the potential allocation of Talents, yes. And like three hundred fifty of which we know only by name, at least until Gomez finds more about them.”

Cameron Scott’s team agreed to keep watch on the building for now. That would serve as an intermediate measure until they had time for real guards. Meanwhile, Johanna, Ulrich, and Miles went upstairs to the top floor to hold a meeting. The building was still mostly empty, but she expected that to change soon, now that they were back, and intended to stay in the city for a while. Johanna still wanted to organize an expedition next year for another go at the Library of Congress, but they had time.

“Do you realize you’ve brought enough to provide Talents for New Sandusky five times over?” Miles noted.

“Probably not that much, probably, but it’s still a significant number. That was the point,” she said back.

“Your plans are unchanged,” he asked.

“Yes. The idea is still to set up empowered roving guard units. People with the power the world needs, who’d go and sweep the area around the city and farms, tackle beasts as soon as they’re spotted, make it safer for the people there,” she replied. “Then you go from there and organize patrols into the mana zones, cull the Changed beasts before they become problems.”

“We move beyond salvager teams then.”

“Them too. Basically, the idea is to allow anyone willing to go into ruins, into mana zones, to obtain the ability to deal with any Changed predator there. In return for clearing them out, whenever they spot any.”

“Define ‘allow’,” Ulrich said.

“I know. I know. We need money for this Talent House to work, and I remember back before the expedition when you said our time was worth more than scavenging,” she replied.

“And so it is. You need to make a living, after all. We all do, one way or another,” the accountant said.

“You made a quick estimate of the value of parchments before we left. $5000 per parchment, more or less. Who is going to pay 30k… 40k for a set of Talents that takes us two minutes to make?”

“Two minutes for you, an eternity for everyone else. You said we had a bit under 140k parchments. If you use that base value, we’re talking nearly two-thirds of a billion dollars. That’s the estimated domestic product of a major city for a year. Maybe not as much as Nashville, but more than New Sandusky.”

Johanna stopped. She’d thought a bit about it, but the magnitude now hit her. Ulrich looked at her with a small smile.

“Unless you maintain a strict rarity, the price would come down anyway,” he said.

She thought about it.

“We have to. We’re the only ones that the Ancient can use to convert parchments, and even with the Library of Congress, it’s still a limited supply, even if it looks unending right now. Gomez said to think about what happens when we die. Unless the Ancient can somehow get the… choice of others, what we make is all there will be.”

“Gomez!”

Ernesto Gomez, Professor of Post-Fall Physics – and Talents – at the Academy of Nashville plastered a huge smile as the dean’s figure barreled out of his lair.

“Dean Sikorski,” he acknowledged.

“What the fuck were you doing? You disappear in a ‘small vacation project’, and then you suddenly drop an absence on us! The semester has started four weeks ago, and you went missing without a warning!”

“I sent a warning.”

“Some warning…”

“Was Lucian inadequate to fill for the early courses? I mean, all he has to do is use my lectures from the previous year. I seldom rewrite the beginning of the year anyway.”

“That’s not the point. What were you doing instead of teaching? I swear, if it’s another of your ‘talent studies’…”

“Fine. I won’t tell you it’s a Talent study, and I even brought gifts enough to forgive me in any case. I mean, I even stopped here before even going home.”

“Uh?”

“See those crates?” Gomez replied, pointing to the two huge wooden boxes next to the door.

“What’s that?” the dean said, almost no longer yelling.

“Books. Originals from before the Fall. Lots. And we shouldn’t even think of touching those before Estrella comes here. She won’t forgive any of us if I open this before she’s there. Yes, even you Nath.”

The Academy secretary rolled her eyes in reply.

“Washington, you say,” the Head Librarian of the Nashville Academy said, looking at the array of covers revealed.

She lifted the first book to peer under, as if she could not believe that there could be more than what was visible.

“The Library of Congress, to be more specific,”

The look on Estrella Miller’s face was priceless, Gomez thought.

“That’s… impossible.”

“Well, it might be some old cache, carefully collected by some crotchety old geezer without heirs, and I happened to be there when they decided to auction his collection for pennies. But no. Those are straight from the shelves of the Library itself, ones that I picked personally. And I was careful to mark the rest…”

Estrella’s breath intake was pretty audible.

“… for later retrieval. Maybe this winter, but I doubt it. Probably early next year.”

“I might even kiss you… No, I’m not making an exception,” she said.

She looked at him.

“How intact is it?”

“One ruined wing on the main building. The others look fine but we didn’t check them.”

The dean raised his hand, interrupting the two.

“My main question is… how? Everyone knows the East Coast is crawling with Changed Beasts, and all expeditions face a grim fate as they go into the mana-heavy areas.”

“It was an almost daily encounter when we were close. And let’s not speak of the giant ostriches that haunt the ruins…”

Gomez stopped as he saw the angry look in the dean’s eyes.

“One advantage of being a renowned Talent scholar – yes, that happens – is that Talented people call upon you. Several Talented organized this expedition. That’s how it worked. Get enough Talents together, and things are no longer unachievable.”

Gomez laughed at the dean’s dismay.

“It’s what makes their study so worthwhile.”

Helena Silvers rode Mists along the remnants of the ancient causeway. She rode fast and hard, knowing she’d screwed up the mission from the elders.

The fortified camp had been a shock. The elders had warned her there should be huge camps, but she could estimate this “Cheat” to have several thousand Tallers around. She had had to spend several days scouting carefully. Reconnaissance lasted only about an hour and a half, she knew from tests back at the Camp. She would have hidden in small places to listen, but Mists was restless. He could sustain his own stealth for as long, probably longer than she did, but leaving him alone was too dangerous. Unlike her, who remembered seeing the last survivor of the Four Families when she was a little girl, Mists had grown up without any Taller around, and he did not like them.

After four days of listening to see if the Tallers could be trusted as she’d been ordered, she’d finally realized what she was missing.

No one used mount-skills – sorry, skills. The guards had mentioned Beast attacks, but they did not seem to be particularly ready for them.

Cheat, she realized, was almost exactly like the Camp. Well, not exactly, but close. Fortified, brimming with defenses, closed when Beasts prowled… and they did not had mounts and their mount-skills at all. They just faced the Beasts from ramparts and fought them with bow or spears, like the non-scouts back home did when scouts like her failed to cull or break the tide.

By then, there was no trace of the expedition she’d followed here. They had departed to “home” she’d remembered. She had not spotted any of the expedition elders. Maybe they had left some of the mount-skills for Cheat to use later, maybe they’d taken all with them. She did not know.

She thought the Tallers could be trusted somewhat, yet the mission was a failure, because she had no idea how the Mooneyed would get the skills required for exodus.

She rode hard and fast home.