Asher Converse's Arc

Chapter 10 of 30

A slow afternoon left the bar half empty. Asher wiped the counter while Tucker leaned against the wall, thumb hooked in his belt. The brass mugs sat clean on their shelf. The mirror threw pale light across the room. Asher looked at the small floor and thought again about growing it. He still had no wood. But he had another idea. "This place needs a name," Asher said. "Men can't favor a house with no name." Tucker turned one gold chain in the light. "Been calling it the grain house." He smiled under his mustache. "Nobody drinks at a grain house." Asher rested both hands on the counter. "Then we pick something. Something men repeat on the road." Tucker pushed off the wall and walked to the side wall. He knocked twice with his knuckle. The sound came back hollow. "You want to grow this room. You keep chewing on it." He knocked again. "Warehouse next door sits empty. Has for months." Asher followed him and pressed his palm flat to the boards. Cold. Empty behind it. "Knock out this wall," he said slowly. "Join the two." "No new lumber," Tucker said. "No hauling through Ajax's gate. No tax on a plank we never buy." He shrugged, plain as always. "The building's already built." Asher's mind ran the numbers. He had coin in the box. Enough for a building, maybe, if the price ran low the way empty things did. The owner would want to be rid of it. Asher knew that game. He had bought the grain house off a drunk for three coins. "Who holds it?" Asher asked. "A trader. Owes on it. Wants out." Tucker grinned. "Sound like anyone you've met?" They found the man that same day. He named a high price. Asher named a low one and did not move. He pointed at the leaking corner of the warehouse roof, at the dust, at the months it had sat dead. The trader argued. Asher waited. He did not take the first offer, or the second. By dusk the man took a fair sum and pressed the key into Asher's hand. Back inside, Asher and Tucker swung hammers at the shared wall. Boards cracked and fell. Dust rose thick. Behind the wall the warehouse opened wide and dark, twice the size of the bar. Asher stood in the gap and saw the room he had wanted. Space for benches. Space for fighters. Space for the wandering men and magic users he meant to draw. Then his boot struck something under the floor dust. He knelt and brushed it clear. A trapdoor, iron-ringed, set flush in the warehouse floor. Old. Sealed with a lock he did not own the key to. Tucker crouched beside him. His grin was gone. "That wasn't in the trader's price." Asher gripped the ring and pulled. It did not budge. He had his bigger room. Now he had a locked door under it, and no idea what waited below.