Everything the guild filed wrong

Classes aren't jobs. They're conversions.

Every guild class converts one thing into another. A Vanguard converts discipline into armour. A Hedgewitch converts memorised grammar into effect. A Priestess converts conviction into healing, which is why tired priestesses heal badly.

A Red Mage converts contact into mana — and the guild has spent eighty years forgetting this, because the conversions are small and unglamorous and always happen to somebody else's benefit.

A hand on a shoulder during a forced march: a trickle. A shared bedroll in a cold corridor: a thin steady line. Skin on skin, sustained, deliberate, with intent: a river. The class was designed for siege defence and battlefield triage. Then the war ended, and the board of examiners reclassified it as a support role, and men like Brannoc Tarr decided the trickle wasn't worth a wage.

Inside the Vein, the converter goes critical — because the Vein's whole economy is heat, and a Red Mage is the only class that can hold somebody else's.

Witness as a second currency

The Vein takes heat. It also takes attention, and attention is worth more.

Every gated Landing is quoted twice: the open price (heat, witnessed, ×1) and the closed price (heat, private, ×3). Witnessed heat is worth three times unwitnessed heat, because the Choir feeds on being heard as much as the stone feeds on being touched. Some doors have no closed price at all — below the required Standing there is no way through, at any price.

Cael Umber's broadcast concession is held by the House of Small Hours, a converted counting-house on the second terrace: forty scrying-stones in racks, three hundred tavern screens on subscription, and a producer named Dessa Quill who sets the weekly Bill and sends her talent soup after a bad Landing.

Quill's one line in the sand: every stone has an off switch, and the party is told where it is. She's proud of that. She thinks it's the same thing as ethics.

Cael Umber runs two economies on one street — the guild pays returners to keep quiet, the House pays talent to be seen — and a party can only be in one of them at a time.

Yvan Delacourt

Red Mage · Conduit · Lv 61 · 27 · POV

Lean, unremarkable, tired. Ash-blond hair he cuts himself. Hands scarred across three knuckles and permanently ink-stained — the hands of a man who has cast a great many small precise spells for other people's benefit. Robes repaired so often the repairs outnumber the original cloth.

He does the work correctly and assumes correctness will be noticed. It never is. He doesn't complain until he explodes, and then it's cold, exact and ruinous — he left an A-rank party in four sentences and a dropped contract seal, and the whole guildhall went silent.

After the Turn: a small sharp-faced woman with too much hair and a waist that looks constructed. The face is his, softened, which is much worse than being made a stranger. Bronze rune-brands along both forearms brighten to gold when he's paying.

• TellsTaps a chalk stick against his thumb when furious · says “right” before something devastating · never raises his voice, goes quieter
• Won't admitHe likes being needed. Not admired — needed. It's the only currency he's ever been paid in, and the Vein has just printed an enormous amount of it.
• ThresholdThree Landings, and he knows the arithmetic before he goes in, and goes anyway

Dagny Rourke

Knight · Warder · Lv 15 · 25

Short, dense, red-faced, built like a barrel with opinions. Dented kite shield she refuses to replace. A knightly code she actually believes, which is the funniest and best thing about her — she feels personally responsible for every injury in the party, including the ones she wasn't in the room for.

She says the thing everyone is thinking at a volume everyone can hear, and has never successfully kept a secret in her life.

After the Turn: six feet of warm brick with a permanent flush across the chest. She panics — not at being a man, but at having a body that isn't hers to offer. It's the first time in her life she's had something she can't make a joke out of.

She becomes the one who asks permission. “Is this all right? Tell me it's all right.” The Vein's design, wearing Dagny's voice.

The Warden

Not a monster. Not a god. A clerk.

A tall, courteous figure in unremarkable grey, hood hiding the top half of a very ordinary face, carrying a brass tally-stick and nothing else. Immaculately polite. Asks, never tells. Will wait — visibly, patiently, without blinking — for as long as it takes.

She cannot be fought. She has been fought. There are eleven names in the guild's ledger with nothing beside them.

She never lies. This is the scariest thing about her: everything she says is literally true, and she is genuinely sorry the account works the way it does. She does not want the party to suffer. She wants them to pay, which is different, and she thinks the difference is obvious.