Vane Vale sat upon an overturned dark rock capital, his kidskin gloves cast aside. It used an ink-stained scrap of linen to polish the tarnished brass rods of his gold-trimmed pocket counting frame.
Three of the lower counter-beads were missing, snapped into glittering brass powder. Just then, the Man Who Returned had cut the first web of debt. Yet the Merchant of Guilt looked anything but defeated. His tailored midnight-blue velvet coat was torn along the left lapel. He showed coarse linen bandages wrapped tightly around his fractured ribs by Brother Ren. But his manicured goatee was neatly brushed, his stance erect. His sharp, hungry eyes glittered with cold, high-born rage.
“A philistine,” Vane muttered, flicking a leftover brass bead with a sharp clack. “A fully uneducated, four-hundred-year-old delinquent. He possesses no appreciation for commercial jurisprudence whatsoever.”
Ren Prime knelt on the silver glass nearby, his sleeves rolled back to his elbows, using the flat of his mammoth bone metal pen to grind dark iron-gall crystals into a thick, lustrous paste with spirit-silk oil. His fingers were stiff, throbbing with the permanent ache of ink-rot. His belly felt like an empty pit of scorched stones—the unceasing body hunger of Berserker Ren’s exclusion penalty.
