CHAPTER 39: IMPOSSIBLE PATHS

  The Trader’s Hall was the busiest prong of the Crown of Hightown, or at least it claimed that honor at the start of every season. It was early spring now, Elias no longer had to round up his age, and business propositions were sprouting like budding flowers amid the long, airy halls of the labyrinthine complex. The Spring Exhibition was always popular, Bertrand explained, but then so was the Summer Exhibition and the Fall Exhibition and, now that he thought about it, the Winter Exhibition too. For Elias, seeing so many companies peddling goods and services from just as many booths was not so much a revelation—he knew commerce was the lifeblood of Sailor’s Rise—as it was an experience. It made the abstract tangible. His city was a picture with no frame, too big to take in with a single glance, but from the perspective of the Spring Exhibition, one could almost see the whole sprawling landscape.

  “Maybe next time, we’ll have our own booth here,” Elias said wistfully as they paid their fare and entered the impressive building.

  The suggestion had been raised once already, of course, but even the cheapest stalls were not cheap, and Briley had unsurprisingly talked them out of it. The most affordable option would set them back a not-so-paltry one hundred relics for the day, and that would have placed them in an area with little foot traffic. Bertrand ultimately agreed with her assessment and said as much. “If we’re going to do an exhibition, we need to do it right, or we’re just wasting money,” he had reasoned. “We need a respectable spot on the floor, and we need a hook, something that makes us special. I know we’re a good deal, but that’s not why people come to an exhibition. We’ll go in prepared when we’re ready to catch some bigger fish.”

  Elias accepted the metaphor and moved on from the idea, though he still wanted to investigate the event. He had never been, and access to the exhibition, at least, was a cost they could justify: a single relic per person.

  Though they would have to go without Briley, who was back in the Broken Isles for a week. It was the first time Elias could recall her visiting home, and he could not help but self-reflect in the wake of her departure: should he be visiting Acreton and seeing his old friends? The thought had hardly crossed his mind in recent months. Alone in his apartment, he'd counted seasons on his fingers. It hadn’t been quite two years yet, but that milestone was fast approaching, and what would he have missed? So often he dismissed his hometown as a place where the only thing that ever changed was the density of dust. Perhaps he did not give his childhood friends enough credit. He wouldn’t know. They had never written back.

  In the present moment, Elias stepped into the main room of the Trader’s Hall, a multi-level chamber with a soaring rib-vaulted ceiling and as many archways as there were stalls set up that afternoon. He and Bertrand perused them in a line, deflecting invitations to come closer. Elias was used to more desperate peddlers than these. He kept his gaze comfortably aloof.

  There was one display the two young men could not ignore, however—nor, it seemed, could many of the exhibition’s patrons, gathering in a loose half-circle around the bespectacled woman in a coffee-colored suit.

  “My friends,” she said over the crowd. “Allow me to introduce you fine folks to the latest invention from Sunrise Locomotion.” She stepped aside, though they could all see it plainly enough: a strange metallic contraption with one large, skinny wheel joined to another smaller one behind it. “Behold… the bicycle.”

  A few people clapped.

  “What the heck is a bicycle, you ask? You’re looking at the modern horse, ladies and gentlemen. She’s sleek, precise, and better suited for city streets. Say goodbye to manure.”

  The clapping picked up, alongside a laugh or two.

  “But don’t take my word for it,” the woman went on. “Seeing is believing, as they say. Jamethy”—she turned toward a gangly, cap-wearing teenager—“take the bicycle for a quick spin around the hall. If you wouldn’t mind, my friends, please give the boy some space.”

  The half-circle dispersed as the crowd reconfigured itself into two sides of an invisible aisle.

  A slender boy of fifteen or so put one foot on a pedal in the middle of the larger wheel, which promptly began to turn, then swiftly swung his free leg over a hard leather seat atop the vehicle. With his other foot, he pushed down on a second pedal. The bicycle was quickly moving, almost in opposition to gravity, so precarious it seemed. Jamethy rode it through the clearing and then in a slow, steady circle.

  There were oohs and aahs, but the show was only getting started. Jamethy pressed the pedals harder and faster as he sped down the main hall, weaving around unsuspecting attendees, yelling, “Coming through! Bicycle coming through!”

  Bertrand laughed with the rest of them. “Bloody brilliant. I want one.”

  “I’m sure Briley will say we can’t afford it,” Elias replied.

  “We probably can’t,” Bertrand admitted. “I wonder how it does on hills. Sailor’s Rise is mostly hills.”

  Elias shrugged.

  Jamethy, meanwhile, was flying. That is, until an elderly woman stepped in front of him, oblivious to the demonstration. He turned the bicycle sharply and suddenly, dodging her by a hair—and into a stall selling men’s wigs. The bicycle bounced and clattered backward, but Jamethy continued his trajectory forward. He landed on the vendor’s wooden table, cracking it in two, before resting on his back between its broken sides. Wigs tumbled down on him like dirt in a grave pit.

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  “Jamethy!” the bespectacled woman shrieked, bolting toward her ambitious apprentice. The oohs and aahs transformed into gasps and gapes.

  The fallen boy reached an arm to the heavens, clutching a single silver-curled wig. “I’m okay,” he let them know.

  The audience applauded, for Jamethy if not the bicycle.

  As for The Two Worlds Trading Company and its curious representatives, they laughed it off and continued their tour as Elias peppered Bertrand with questions about the businesses they walked by. Bertrand was unfamiliar with most of them, though he noted a few of the larger ones. Along with The Graystone Company, which needed no introduction, there were two others they passed with council seats in the House of Merchants—the one prong of the Crown that Elias had yet to venture inside. Elias recalled that only ten such companies existed at any one time, though the hundred largest still retained voting rights. A vote would be nice, he thought to himself, though their current revenue—while improved over this time a year ago—put them nowhere near that particular benchmark.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Elias halted at the end of the main hall, stopping Bertrand with one hand to his chest. “What is that?” He nodded toward a sign that read, Attention, new entrepreneurs! Enter for your chance to win the best ticket in town!

  “Sounds like a scam,” Bertrand answered.

  “We are new entrepreneurs,” Elias reminded his business partner, walking over anyway.

  Bertrand followed like a parent after his child.

  “Good afternoon, young man,” said the woman behind the booth, who looked only a decade older than them. She was an attractive Southlander and spoke with an accent Jalander had either lost or maybe never had. “Budding businessmen, are we?”

  “We run The Two Worlds Trading Company,” Elias informed her, as if she might have heard of them. “We have clients in Azir and the United North.”

  “An impressive feat for someone your age,” the woman said, eyebrows raised, “but I bet you want more, don’t you? Bigger clients, a larger fleet, more relics. Tell me I’m wrong?”

  Elias could not, though Bertrand looked ready to. His guarded gaze softened and his stiff posture deflated as Bertrand decided to let Elias have this.

  “As I’m sure you know, connections are everything in this town,” the woman went on. “Every spring, representatives from the House of Merchants—the hundred biggest companies in the Rise—are invited to the pristine estate of none other than Mr. Bartholomew Grimsby. The dinner is divine, my dear, but most valuable of all is the company, a chance to rub shoulders with the real movers and shakers of this city—of this whole continent. The world is remodeled behind the doors of that great room, the rich made richer. And you, on behalf of your company, could sit at their table. What you do with that opportunity is entirely your purview. I merely offer one lucky man the seat.”

  Elias considered mentioning that he had already been to Mr. Grimsby’s estate, though this sounded like a more intimate affair. And the last time he’d ventured into that mansion, he had indeed acquired information that led to the timely acquisition of The Sapphire Spirit and the subsequent inception of The Two Worlds Trading Company. He’d had nothing to offer then, save for an ear, and yet he had gained everything. Now he possessed a whole business with which he might barter.

  “How does this work?” Elias inquired.

  “Tell me, are you a lucky man?” she asked.

  “I can be,” he said.

  “See this barrel.” She redirected their attention to a large wooden barrel beside her booth, brimming with colorful fabric balls. “Somewhere inside this container is a single black ball. Reach in and retrieve it, and you have your ticket. It’s that simple.”

  “What if no one grabs the black ball before the day is over?” Bertrand interjected, though Elias was puzzling over that question too.

  “Then,” she said, “we pick names from a hat.”

  “You could just pick names from a hat in the first place,” Bertrand muttered.

  “We could, but that would be less fun,” the woman explained, picking up a red ball and squeezing before throwing it back in. “Mr. Grimsby himself insists on the rules of the contest. I believe it is an old game from his childhood.”

  “Must be a pretty ancient game, then,” Bertrand said. “Two hundred, three hundred years old?”

  The game host entertained his jests with a reserved smirk. “It’s five relics to play.”

  Elias, who was more interested in odds than jokes, asked, “How many balls are in there?”

  She shrugged. “A few hundred, give or take.”

  He was running numbers in his head, though math could scarcely rationalize the steep entry fee, nor could Bertrand, judging by the thinly veiled expression on his face. And then Elias remembered who he was—what he was. He did not need math.

  “I’ll give it a go,” he said.

  “And your friend?”

  “Elias can represent us both,” Bertrand informed them. “He is our chief proprietor, after all. That is what I said in Azir, right? That meeting with Sultan Atakan is still a blur.”

  The woman nodded as Elias counted relics and dropped five of them into her open palm. “Dig deep, my friend, and may fortune guide you,” she said. “Just don’t grab more than one ball, or it doesn’t count.”

  Elias rolled up his right sleeve and positioned himself before the barrel as if he might dive into it. He raised a single hand, exhaled a single breath, and searched for a path. Find the black ball, he told himself—told his gift, like some internal genie in need of negotiation. It must have been a murkier maze than most, for he saw nothing at first, fearing he would have to guess blindly just like all the other poor saps sacrificing their relics to the cruel gods of false hope. He bided his time, turning his arm in heavy circles as if mixing paint, pretending to revel in the drama of it all. Drama, more than humor, the game host was happy to indulge.

  Later, Elias would question why this task proved so difficult. It had seemed to him a simple one. Was it the sheer array of possibilities? A few hundred, she had said. When he aimed a pistol, his sight—assuming it was needed at all—provided a small adjustment. Indeed, Elias was already an adept marksman, but skill was an absent partner in this particular endeavor. Simple though this seemed, he was asking his gift to go it alone. It was a logical theory, though he had no idea if it were true. Perhaps he would ask Jalander.

  Back to the barrel: Elias was practically stirring a stew, still elbow-deep, feeling around for the right fabric ball. Or so it seemed to the ignorant observer.

  “Found the one yet?” the woman asked.

  “Not… quite… almost.” Elias sounded pained, as if these plush balls were made of rougher material.

  Bertrand crossed his arms and cocked an eyebrow.

  And then, at last, Elias saw it. Fainter and quicker than usual, like light flashing on a moving blade. He had almost missed it, but then he found it again. He moved his hand rightward, downward, then a bit deeper. The line flickered into focus. Still, he was not quite sure that the ball he squeezed was the one—as opposed to being next to the one—but his time was up, and he needed to make a choice.

  Slowly, dramatically, Elias lifted his hand out of the barrel. He could tell both Bertrand and the woman were expecting to see a green ball or a blue ball or any ball but a black one. He couldn’t blame them. They did not know. They did not know that Elias could indeed be a lucky man precisely because he wielded luck like a pencil to paper, and as his late mother could attest, her son had always loved drawing—loved crafting nigh impossible fantasies out of whatever reality put in arm’s reach.

  Elias finally revealed his ball, but Bertrand said it first: “Holy hell. Do you win every contest you enter?”