The Guild Hall smelled like sweat and old wood and too many people in a room that wasn't big enough for all of them.
Renn stood in line. Registration line. Fourteen people ahead of him. He counted them because that's what he did.
The Greymarsh Guild Hall was on the main street, which in Greymarsh meant the street that was slightly wider than the others. Two stories. Stone foundation, timber frame, a sign out front that said ADVENTURER'S GUILD in letters that had been repainted so many times the wood underneath was warping. Inside it was one big room on the ground floor with a counter along the back wall, a job board on the left, and tables on the right where people ate and argued and occasionally threw things at each other.
Coby was outside. He'd already registered yesterday. Common Striker. In and out in four minutes. Nobody had asked him questions because nobody cared about Common grade Strikers. There were a thousand of them in every province.
Summoners were different.
Renn knew this going in. He'd seen the look the proctor gave him at the ceremony. He'd seen the woman pull her kid closer on the street. The separate table at the mess wasn't something he'd learned about from reading. He'd watched three summoners eat alone at a table meant for eight while everyone else filled the room around them and left that table like it had a fence.
The line moved. Eleven people now. A clerk behind the counter was processing registrations with the energy of someone who'd done this nine hundred times and expected to do it nine hundred more. Name, class, grade, province of origin, emergency contact. Stamp. Next.
The man in front of Renn was big. Not fat. Built. The kind of body you get from years of swinging something heavy at things that try to kill you. Striker class, probably high Vanguard tier based on the quality of his armor. The leather was reinforced with metal plates at the joints and the sword on his hip had a custom grip that said money.
He turned around while waiting. Looked at Renn. Looked at the registration card in Renn's hand.
"Summoner?"
Renn didn't answer right away. The card was face-up and the class field was visible if you were looking, which this man was.
"Yeah."
The man made a sound. Not quite a laugh. Closer to the noise you make when you step in something and you're not surprised because you saw it coming but you're still annoyed.
"Great. Another one." He turned to the person in front of him, a woman with a bow on her back. "Did you hear that? Summoner." He said the word the way people say cockroach. Like it was something that shouldn't be in the room.
The woman glanced at Renn. Looked away. Didn't want to be part of this but didn't want to be against it either.
The big man turned back. "Listen, kid. Word of advice from someone who's been running gates for six years. Stay out of people's way. Your smoke puppets might look cute in an F-rank dungeon but in a real fight they're a liability. They block corridors, they don't listen to party commands, and when YOU go down, they vanish and leave the rest of us exposed. Every summoner I've ever partied with was dead weight wrapped in a light show."
Renn looked at him. Counted. Two exits visible from here. The man's sword was on his right hip, draw angle about forty degrees. His weight was on his left foot. Bad habit. If something came from his right side he'd have to shift before he could swing.
None of that mattered here. But the counting happened anyway.
"You done?" Renn said.
"Excuse me?"
"I asked if you were done. Because the line's moving."
The man's jaw did something. Renn could see the muscle work. Six years of gate clearing and zero patience for summoners. You could see it on him.
"You think you're clever."
"Not really. I just don't want to be here longer than I have to be."
The man stepped closer. Close enough that Renn could smell the gate dust on his armor. Iron and something burnt.
"Let me tell you what happens to summoners who don't know their place. The Authority has a whole division for you people. They show up. They ask questions. They put things in files. And then one day you wake up and your class is registered as Restricted and the only gates you're allowed to enter are the ones they choose for you. You want that?"
Renn felt the mana in his chest. Sitting there. Heavy. He could summon right here. Three Footmen in the guild hall and every person in this room would see solid iron soldiers that didn't look like smoke puppets and didn't look like a light show and the man in front of him would have to reconsider the word liability.
He didn't.
Because that was exactly the kind of thing that ended up in a file.
"No," Renn said. "I don't want that."
The man held his stare for a count of five. Renn didn't blink because blinking was a choice and he chose not to.
"Smart kid." The man turned around. Line moved.
But the woman with the bow was looking at Renn now. And a younger guy two spots ahead had turned his head. And the clerk behind the counter had paused for half a second before stamping the next card.
Renn filed all of it. People watching. People noticing. In Greymarsh that didn't mean much. In a bigger city it would mean everything.
His turn came. The clerk was a thin woman with reading glasses and the posture of someone who'd been sitting in that chair since before the Rending.
"Name."
"Renn Aldis."
"Class."
"Summoner."
Her pen stopped for a fraction of a second. Then continued.
"Grade."
"Rare."
"Province."
"Harken. Greymarsh."
"Emergency contact."
"Maren Aldis. Same address."
The clerk filled out the card. Stamped it. Then she pulled a second form from a different stack. A yellow one. Renn hadn't seen anyone else get a yellow form.
"Summoner supplemental registration," she said. Her voice was flat. Procedural. "Required for all summoner-class Awakened. Lists your construct type, maximum deployment count, and any passive or active skills that affect party composition. The Authority reviews these quarterly."
The Authority. Quarterly review. There it was.
"Construct type," she said. Pen ready.
"Iron Footman."
"Maximum deployment count."
Twelve. His actual capacity was twelve. But his public display was three.
"Three," he said.
"Passive skills."
Iron Bulwark. Fifteen percent damage reduction across all constructs. The thing that made his Footmen survive hits that should kill them.
"None that I know of," he said.
The clerk didn't look up. She wrote what he said and stamped the yellow form and put it in a separate tray. The separate tray went to a separate office. The separate office sent copies to the provincial capital. From the capital to the Authority.
Another data point. Another thread in a file that was getting heavier without Renn being able to see it.
"Welcome to the Guild," the clerk said. She handed him his card and the yellow copy. "Mess hall is to the right. Summoner seating is in the back."
Summoner seating. In the back.
Of course.
He took the card and the form and walked to the right side of the hall where the tables were. The mess area was about half full. Groups of two and three and five sitting around plates of whatever the guild kitchen was serving today. Bread and stew from the smell of it. Not good stew. The kind where you can tell the cook had a budget and didn't love their job.
The summoner table was in the back corner. Against the wall. Furthest from the door, furthest from the counter, furthest from everything that felt like it mattered. Four chairs around a table meant for eight. Three of them occupied.
A woman in her thirties with dark circles under her eyes and a coat that had been mended twice. A man about Renn's age who was staring at his bread like it owed him something. And a girl who couldn't have been more than nineteen, hunched over her bowl with her hair hanging in her face like a curtain.
None of them looked up when Renn sat down.
He sat anyway. The chair was uncomfortable. The table had a wobble.
"New?" the older woman said after about a minute.
"Yeah."
"What do you summon?"
"Iron Footmen."
She nodded. Didn't ask what that meant. Didn't ask about grade or level or capacity. Summoners at the back table didn't ask each other those questions. Maybe because the answers didn't change how the room looked at you.
"I'm Harra," she said. "That's Deen. That's Mira. We eat here because it's free. The food's bad but the price is right."
"Renn."
"Nice to meet you, Renn. Welcome to the worst table in any guild hall in the Dominion."
He ate. The stew was as bad as it smelled. The bread was better because bread is hard to ruin. Mira didn't talk. Deen didn't talk. Harra talked enough for all of them but it was the kind of talking that filled space without requiring anything back, and Renn appreciated that.
Outside after, Coby was waiting. He was leaning on the wall doing something with a piece of string that might have been a knot exercise or might have been boredom.
"How'd it go?"
"I'm registered."
"That bad?"
"There's a separate form for summoners. Yellow. Goes to the Authority."
Coby stopped messing with the string. "A separate form."
"And a separate table. In the back."
"Renn."
"Yeah."
"That's messed up."
"Yeah."
They walked. Greymarsh in the late afternoon looked the same as Greymarsh in the morning which looked the same as Greymarsh always. Grey. The Hum. Buildings that leaned.
Maren's house was on the east edge of town. Small. One story. Stone walls, timber roof, a garden in the back that she couldn't tend anymore but refused to let anyone else touch. The door had iron chimes on it that she'd hung years ago. An old habit. Something about iron and Bleed Nights. The chimes didn't do anything except make noise when the wind came from the north.
Renn could hear them from the street. Faint. Familiar.
He went in.
The house smelled like boiled rice and the herbs Maren used for her tea. Something earthy underneath that. Old wood. Old stone. A house that had been standing since before the Rending and would probably keep standing after.
Maren was in the kitchen. Sitting at the table because standing for long stretches was hard now. She had a bowl in front of her and she was shelling something. Beans maybe. Her fingers worked slow but steady. She didn't look up when the door opened because she knew the sound of his boots.
"You smell like iron and gate-dust," she said. "Eat before you explain."
There was food on the stove. Rice. Some kind of vegetable thing that was probably better than it looked. Renn served himself because he always served himself and then he served her because he always did that too and she'd stopped protesting about six months ago.
They ate. Quiet for a while. The iron chimes clinked once outside. Wind from the north.
"I cleared an E-rank gate today," he said.
"And?"
"Killed the boss. Got some crystals. Enough for your medicine for a while."
Maren put a bean in the bowl. Her fingers were thin. The skin on them was loose and she was getting smaller every month and she'd kill anyone who pointed it out.
"I don't need you to pay for my medicine."
"I know."
"I have the pension."
"I know."
"The pension covers it."
It didn't. The pension covered about sixty percent of it and the rest came from selling vegetables from the garden that she could barely maintain and occasionally from the kindness of the neighbor two doors down who brought extra food and pretended it was surplus from his own kitchen.
Renn knew all of this. He'd done the math three years ago and the numbers hadn't gotten better.
"The pension covers it," he said.
Maren looked at him. Her eyes were sharp. That was the thing about her. Everything else was slowing down but her eyes were exactly the same as the day he'd woken up in this body and she'd been sitting by the bed with those eyes and he'd known immediately that this was a person who saw things.
"You're a bad liar," she said.
"I know."
"You've always been a bad liar. Even before you got sick. Your face does a thing when you're not telling the truth. Right here." She touched the corner of her own eye. "Your grandfather did it too."
Something moved in his chest. Not mana.
"Eat your rice," she said.
He ate his rice.
After dinner he washed the dishes because he always washed the dishes. Maren went to her chair by the window. The window faced east, toward the Bulwark. On clear nights you could see the faint shimmer of the barrier from here. Tonight wasn't clear. Just grey.
"Renn."
"Yeah."
"Your father was a Striker. Common grade. Like your friend."
He stopped washing. She didn't talk about Dael often. His father. The original Renn's father. The man who died during the Rending when Renn was three.
"He wasn't a strong man," Maren said. "Not compared to the others. Common grade. Basic skills. He took every gate assignment they gave him because the pay was better than the garrison salary and he had a wife and two children. He died in a D-rank gate that went wrong during a Bleed Night. The party lost three people. He was one of them."
She was looking out the window. Not at Renn.
"The Authority sent a letter. Form letter. 'We regret to inform.' I kept it for a year. Then I burned it because keeping it wasn't helping anyone."
Renn dried a plate. Set it down. Picked up another.
"Your mother died three months later. Evacuation of the eastern towns. Sera was seven. You were three. I raised you both from a chair in this kitchen."
She turned from the window. Looked at him.
"You're stronger than he was. I can see that already. Whatever you got from that ring, it's more than what Dael had. But Renn." She paused. Her hands were folded in her lap and they were steady. "Being strong in this world means people watch you. And the people who watch the strongest are the people who decide what happens to summoners."
She knew. Not what he was. Not the class, not the grade, not the golden finger. But she knew that being a summoner in the Grenn Dominion was a kind of danger that had nothing to do with gates.
"Be careful," she said. "Not for me. For Sera. She's at that academy and she doesn't need her little brother showing up on an Authority list before he's been awake for a week."
"I'll be careful."
"You say that."
"I mean it."
"You sound like your grandfather." She turned back to the window. "He said the same thing every morning before he went to the wall. For twenty-three years. He meant it every time. He came home every time. And then one morning he didn't."
Renn finished the dishes. He put the clean plates in the rack above the sink. Maren was quiet now. The chimes clicked outside. He stood in the kitchen for a moment and the house was small and warm and it smelled like rice and herbs and old wood and he knew without having to think about it that this was the most valuable thing he had. Not the class. Not the Footmen. This.
A house with a woman in it who never missed anything.
He went to his room. Small. A bed, a desk, a window that faced the garden. He sat on the bed and opened his status screen.
Level 4. Three skills. Three sealed. Twelve capacity. Iron Bulwark discovered. Legion Bond active.
Below the skill list, in a section he hadn't looked at closely before, there was a line he'd missed.
[SUMMONER REGISTRATION: ACTIVE]
[OVERSIGHT AUTHORITY: MONITORING STATUS: STANDARD]
[QUARTERLY REVIEW: PENDING]
The System tracked it. Of course it did. The System tracked everything. And somewhere in the bureaucracy between Greymarsh and the capital, a clerk was putting his yellow form into a stack that would become a file that would eventually reach someone who cared about grey pulses and unusual constructs.
Renn closed the screen. Lay back on the bed. Stared at the ceiling.
Four hundred miles away, in an office that smelled like old paper and cold coffee, a junior analyst in the Oversight Authority's Provincial Anomaly Division was sorting the week's intake. Forty-three reports from twelve provinces. Routine. Unusual awakening readings, gate energy fluctuations, construct behavior flags.
Report number thirty-one. Harken Province. Greymarsh.
Anomalous awakening pulse. Grey. Duration 1.2 seconds. No registry match. Subject: Aldis, Renn. Class: Summoner. Grade: Rare.
The analyst read it. Read it again. Opened the cross-reference database and typed in the pulse color. Grey.
No matches in the current registry.
No matches in the historical registry.
No matches in the restricted registry.
She frowned. Pulled a red tag from the drawer. Red tags meant the report went up one level instead of into the archive. She clipped the tag to the file and put it in the outgoing tray.
The outgoing tray went to the senior analyst tomorrow morning. The senior analyst would read it over lunch. He'd frown too, probably. Run the same search. Get the same empty results.
Then he'd put it in the tray for the Division Director.
That tray had been sitting on Director Gavrel Nuth's desk for three weeks, growing taller. He'd get to it eventually.