Chapter 5 —
The wall grew slowly, the way distant things do when you're walking toward them — imperceptibly at first, then all at once acquiring detail and scale. What had looked like a low line on the horizon resolved itself, as Jon closed the distance, into something more substantial than he'd initially judged. The stone was pale grey and rough-hewn, fitted together with the kind of imprecision that spoke of age rather than carelessness. Moss had colonized the lower courses. The top edge was uneven, worn smooth in some places and chipped in others by weather and time.
And in front of the gate, five guards stood in loose formation.
Jon felt his pace quicken. He hadn't expected the feeling — a sudden, almost childlike rush of excitement at the sight of other people. After the emptiness of the prairie, the sheer humanness of them, the fact of their presence, hit him somewhere unguarded. He was almost jogging by the time the nearest guard stepped forward and raised a hand.
The man was broad across the shoulders, wearing a mismatched assembly of leather bracers, padded cloth and, incongruously, a steel chest plate that had clearly seen better decades. One of its buckles was missing and it sat slightly askew, and Jon had a private doubt that it would stop anything moving with serious intent. The guard's expression arranged itself into something authoritative as Jon approached — and then Jon got close enough for the man to actually see him, and the expression faltered.
The guard looked him over once, twice, with the careful recalibration of someone mentally revising their opening position. Jon's clothes were from another world entirely — the cut, the fabric, the small details that couldn't be faked — and the gold rings on his fingers caught the light with an unmistakable weight to them. The guard settled, visibly, on either noble or foreigner, and either way not my problem to antagonize.
"Sir." The tone had shifted entirely. "What brings you here, sir?"
Jon heard the sounds clearly. He understood none of them.
He stood there for a moment, very aware of the four other guards watching him, and felt the particular embarrassment of having no language available. He opened his mouth, closed it, tried again. His hand went to the back of his head. He pointed at his own chest.
"Jon," he said. Then he shook his head slowly, raised his shoulders, spread his hands — the universal performance of I have no idea what you just said.
The guard blinked. Something moved across his face — recognition, or the beginnings of a plan — and his expression broke into a wide, sudden smile. He raised one palm toward Jon in the unmistakable gesture of stay there, then turned and jogged back toward the gate, exchanging rapid words with the other guards as he went.
In Jon's ear, Lora's voice came in quietly.
"The language is distinct but the phonemic structure isn't entirely alien. I need more data before I can give you anything reliable, but I'm recording everything I'm hearing."
Jon turned his wrist slightly upward. "I didn't know you could do that."
On the small holographic display above the watch face, Lora materialized — her chosen form, a young woman in a simple dress, chin raised, expression thoroughly pleased with herself. "What exactly did you think I was doing when you weren't asking me questions?" She let that sit for precisely a moment. "I can do a great many things you haven't asked about yet."
Jon opened his mouth to respond but the guard was already returning, and he wasn't alone. Behind him came two more — another man and a woman, the woman carrying something, the man scanning ahead with sharp eyes. When they cleared the gate and saw the holographic figure floating above Jon's wrist, all three stopped dead.
The guard with the box — a small, flat thing of dark wood — actually took a step back. The woman put her hand on the arm of the man beside her. They exchanged a rapid, low exchange between them, eyes moving between Jon and the luminous figure above his watch.
Lora, for her part, was studying them with the barely contained curiosity of someone encountering something genuinely new — her head tilted, her expression cycling through rapid micro-observations.
"Lora," Jon said under his breath. "Be polite."
She turned and looked at him with an expression that was entirely too human for an AI. Then she turned back to the guards, composed herself, and performed a small, deliberate bow.
"Hello," she said — and she said it in their language.
Jon looked at her sharply.
The guards stared. The woman's grip on the man's arm tightened. Then the first guard, with visible effort, produced a stilted, careful sound that was recognizably a greeting in return — the kind of response you give when you're not entirely sure what you're responding to but don't want to be rude to it.
The guard with the box stepped forward. He held it out to Jon with both hands, and motioned — open it.
Jon took it carefully. The box was light, the wood warm and slightly rough under his fingers. Inside, resting in a bed of dark cloth, was a ring. It looked like wood at first glance — the grain was visible, running in fine parallel lines around the band — but when Jon lifted it, the weight and the cool smoothness of it against his skin said something else entirely. Metal, or something behaving like metal, wearing the surface of wood. Hard in a way that wood wasn't.
He turned it over in his fingers. The guard gestured again, gently — put it on.
Jon slid it onto his right index finger. As he did, he felt the guard's eyes drop to his hands — to the gold rings already there — and saw the man's expression change. Something quick and complicated moved across his face, which he then carefully put away.
The ring settled. A sensation moved through Jon's hand and up his arm — not unpleasant, not exactly warm, more like the feeling of pressure equalizing, like ears clearing. And then the guard spoke again.
"Sir — my name is Lance. Welcome to Treria."
Jon heard it as cleanly as if the man had spoken his own language his entire life.
All three guards brought their right fists to their chests simultaneously, heads bowed, left arms straight at their sides. A formal salute, precise and practiced.
"Ah — yes. Thank you." Jon straightened slightly, instinctively matching their formality without knowing why.
In his ear, Lora spoke before he could ask. "The ring appears to be reacting with the compound in the air — the one I told you about last night. It's acting as a catalyst. The translation isn't the ring itself, it's the compound already in your system responding to whatever the ring triggers. The ring just unlocks the process."
Jon gave the smallest possible nod, which could have passed for simple acknowledgment of Lance's greeting.
He understood barely a tenth of what she'd just explained. But he was smiling, and that was enough for now.
Lance walked him through the gate with the quiet efficiency of a man who had made a decision about this stranger and was going to stand behind it.
The smell arrived before anything visual made sense. Horses — the warm, sharp presence of them — layered under and over everything else, mixed with woodsmoke and something cooking somewhere and the yeasty undertone of a working settlement that had been working for a long time. Jon's face did something involuntary and he breathed through his mouth for a moment until his senses recalibrated, and then beneath all of it he found it — that other smell, the one that seemed to belong to this world specifically, the sweetness that had no earthly equivalent, threading through everything like a low note under noise.
The town came into focus around him as he walked.
Timber buildings with clay-packed walls, some whitewashed, some bare. Narrow paths of packed earth between them, worn smooth by long use. Stalls and doorways and the general organised chaos of a place going about its business — children moving between adult legs, a man arguing pleasantly with a woman over a cart of something round and orange, two dogs conducting a detailed investigation of a doorstep with great professional seriousness.
Jon looked at all of it and felt genuinely, helplessly interested.
He did not look at where he was putting his feet.
The carriage came at speed from his left — hoofbeats and the grind of wheels on packed earth — and he walked directly into its path without registering any of it until a hand caught his arm and pulled, sharply and decisively, and he was yanked sideways and stumbled, caught himself, and found he was standing very close to someone he hadn't been standing close to a second ago.
The carriage hammered past. The coachman shouted something back over his shoulder that needed no translation.
Jon straightened and looked down.
A hood, drawn forward far enough to shadow most of a face. A slender figure, already stepping back and half-turning to go.
"I'm sorry," he said quickly. "Miss — I wasn't watching where I was going."
She paused but didn't turn back fully.
Jon caught himself reaching for her arm and stopped — pulled his hand back before contact, held it up instead, open. "Wait. Please."
She turned. The hood shifted slightly. He still couldn't make out her features clearly, but he could feel the quality of her attention — measured, precise, giving nothing.
"I just wanted to say thank you," he said. "You didn't have to do that."
A pause. She looked at him with the careful eyes of someone who had heard a lot of explanations and had learned to hold them lightly until proven.
He reached up without particular ceremony and slid one of his silver rings off his finger. He held it out.
"I'm looking for an inn. Do you know where I might find one?"
She looked at the ring. Then at him. Then at the ring again. The silence had a thinking quality to it.
"There's one at the end of the alley over there." She gestured without pointing — a slight motion of the chin toward a narrow passage between two buildings. "I can take you."
"I'd appreciate that."
She turned without waiting and began walking. Jon fell into step behind her.
"Alice," she said, after a moment.
He blinked. "Sorry?"
"My name. Alice."
"Right. Sorry — Jon."
She glanced back at him briefly, a sideways look from within the hood. "You're not from around here."
Jon measured his response in the half-second he had available. Take nothing to the grave that you can keep alive by not speaking it.
"Merchant," he said easily. "From another province. I'm passing through, doing some sightseeing before the work starts."
Alice said nothing to that. Whether she believed it or simply chose not to contest it, he couldn't tell.
"A word of advice," she said, after a pause. "Don't give precious jewelry to strangers."
"You pulled me out of the way of a carriage."
"I'm still a stranger." She glanced back again, and this time he caught the edge of an expression — not quite a smile, but something adjacent. Her eyes dropped briefly to the gold ring still on his hand. "Though I suppose if you're the type to wear that, you can afford to be generous."
Jon looked at the ring. He hadn't thought about how it looked here. He filed the observation away.
Lora's voice arrived in his ear as the inn came into view at the end of the alley — a low building with a wide door and a sign above it that he couldn't read but didn't need to.
"Jon. Small issue."
He kept his expression neutral.
"We have no currency from this world. None whatsoever."
He stopped walking. Alice noticed immediately and turned.
"Is something wrong?"
"I just realized," Jon said, with the measured calm of someone rapidly assembling a plan from available materials, "that I left my money with my things. Is there a pawn shop nearby? Somewhere I could exchange some items for local coin?"
Alice looked at him for a long moment. The complicated quality of her expression suggested she was running several calculations simultaneously.
She turned without a word and led him two streets over.
The pawnbroker's shop was dim and smelled of old metal and wood oil, its shelves carrying a careful arrangement of items that told a quiet story of people needing money faster than they needed their things. A young woman behind the counter looked up as they entered.
Jon scanned the shelves as he walked in.
Lora was in his ear before he reached the counter. "Jon. Only the gold ring. Don't put anything else down."
He wanted to ask why and didn't. He simply reached up and removed the gold ring from his finger and set it on the counter.
The woman behind the counter looked at it. Then she stood up straighter.
"I'll need to call the owner for this, sir. One moment."
Jon waited. Looked around. Nobody in the shop was looking at him directly, but the particular quality of not-looking told him they were. He glanced at the shelves again — rings, brooches, small items in copper and silver, the occasional piece in something that might have been low-grade bronze.
Lora again. "From the moment we entered the gate, people have been watching the rings on your hand. In a pawnbroker's shop containing perhaps three items that could generously be called gold — gold is either rare here, or extremely valuable, or both."
The owner appeared from the back room — an older man, compact and careful, with the assessing eyes of someone who had spent a career measuring things accurately. He saw the ring immediately. He picked it up with both hands and turned it slowly, studying the workmanship with an expression that mixed reverence with the professional effort to not show reverence.
He set it down. Looked at Jon properly — the clothes, the bearing, the faint sweetness of the open air still on him.
"Ten gold," he said. His tone was that of a man making a fair offer and knowing it.
Jon had no frame of reference whatsoever. But Lora's silence was permission, so he nodded.
"Agreed."
Alice left him at the door of the inn.
"This is you," she said simply, and turned.
"Alice —"
She kept walking. Jon watched her for a moment, then let it go and pushed inside.
The innkeeper was a woman somewhere in solid middle age, with the comfortable authority of someone who had been running this particular operation for long enough that almost nothing surprised her anymore. She looked Jon over once and smiled.
"How long will you be staying, sweetheart?"
"Two weeks to start," he said. "Meals included if possible."
"Twenty silver."
Jon reached into his pocket and produced one of the gold coins. The innkeeper looked at it, looked at him, and exhaled through her nose with the particular patience of someone doing mental arithmetic.
"It'll take me a moment to sort change, sir. Unless you don't mind a mix of copper in with it."
He was about to say he could wait when Lora spoke. Take it.
He took it.
He walked to his room with sixty silver coins and two hundred copper pieces in a small cloth purse that was considerably heavier and more inconvenient than he would have liked, and sat on the edge of the bed while Lora talked him through the currency system — ten copper to one silver, one hundred silver to one gold — with the patient efficiency of someone explaining something they'd already worked out completely.
"That's a reasonable system," Jon said. "Just impractical to carry."
"Most early monetary systems are."
He looked at the box the guards had given him at the gate — still sitting on the table where he'd set it without thinking — and then lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
"Lora."
"Yes."
"Why am I so calm about all of this?"
A brief pause. "Almost certainly the compound in the air. I mentioned it was affecting your physiology — your nervous system appears to be among the things it's moderating. You're not suppressed, exactly. Just — steadier than you would otherwise be."
"Mana," Jon said, mostly to himself.
"Sorry?"
"The compound. Let's call it mana. Like in the novels."
A beat. Then, with great dignity: "Copy that. You're the boss."
Jon closed his eyes. His feet ached pleasantly from the morning's walk. The bed was narrow and the mattress was stuffed with something he didn't want to examine too closely, but it was horizontal and it was his, and the room was quiet except for the muffled sounds of the town outside.
Three soft knocks came at the door.
He opened his eyes. Sat up. Crossed the room and opened the door.
The innkeeper stood in the corridor, hands folded in front of her, her expression carrying something that wasn't quite business.