Chapter 7: Chapter 7 – Of A Society Uninclined Towards Rents

What do you mean, how much is the rent?

I stood there in the middle of the road for a moment, gawping at Kelly. My instincts about roads and being on them took over pretty much immediately, sending me jogging absently in her wake, but I was too preoccupied to really notice.

Well, what exactly did I mean?

Modern Shemmai had a word for rent, though it didn’t have the same connotations as the almost-identical Ancient Shemmai word. The old word—offerings that you owed the Gods above and beyond the value you receive—certainly wasn’t the right concept. Sylvan literally didn’t have the word; the closest you could get in Sylvan was the upkeep you owed to your environment in order to maintain its health, and that wasn’t much different from the Shemmai word upkeep, which it seemed cognate with. A loanword, maybe?

Koshe had a word for rent, the fee you paid to someone who owned property for the right to temporarily use it. Qatn, the tradertalk pidgin that I could expect any merchant from out of the country to know… sort of did? Were taxes that you owed a private individual a form of rent? That was a weird concept, but Qatn was a weird language.

Did Kelly really not know what rent was?

“Well, I mean, I don’t own the house,” I began, “or whatever I wind up using and living in. So there’s this notion that you pay, maybe seasonally, for the right to use the house and the land it’s on? Which the owner uses for repairs, upgrades, and as profit?”

“I know what rent is, you don’t have to patronize me.” She turned to roll her eyes at me. “But why would you be paying rent? The land in the village is managed by the village on behalf of the Duchy, which acts on behalf of the Kingdom; and it’s owned by the Commons as a whole. Well, technically and legally it is, but that’s just kind of silly, right?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.” I blinked a few times. “Then why does Koshe have a word for renting land that’s separate from the word for renting an object?”

Her face made that face that I was already getting familiar with, the why would I know that face. “There isn’t a Low Road within a hundred miles. Why would I know anything about Koshe?”

“I don’t know? Why would the System have handed it to me, if it’s not relevant?”

“How many languages did you—no, Kelly, focus. At least one of us needs to stay focused.” I almost giggled at the fierce glare she fixed upon herself, but managed to stay somber to match the professional seriousness she was trying to embody. “Sophie, Koshe is the language of a nation—a set of nations, really—that is, in fact, not the Kingdom of Shem. They aren’t Shemmai, they speak a different language, obviously they might do things differently!”

My mind was sufficiently abuzz that I barely noticed when she grabbed me by the elbow and sat me down on a bench. “So how do the economics of this whole thing even work? I mean, okay, so I’m not paying rent. But there’s costs, there’s upkeep, there’s defraying the initial capital expenditure. What kind of taxes or fees or whatever am I going to owe?”

“For a house? Nothing, of course.” I blinked at her in astonishment. “What? We need surplus capacity on the Stone Team or they won’t be able to deal with emergencies. And have more houses than we have people! A township will charge tax on location preference, but it’s usually pretty low. Nobody wants to evict anyone—’cause eviction is awful, obviously—so it’s just something to keep everyone feeling like the system is… fair, I guess?”

“How does that even—is this like the refectories? Meredith, the Captain, she said that meals are funded through something dungeon-related.”

Kelly sat down next to me and, in an obviously over-dramatic gesture—even if it was heartfelt, which it seemed to be—buried her face into my shoulder. “This was tomorrow,” she mumbled. “Economics was on our tomorrow list. Today was the tour.”

I reached over with my other hand to pat her on the head, trying not to think about how nice the contact felt. There were all sorts of reasons why I needed to not be thinking about that, starting with the fact that making a move on her would be incredibly fraught; given the implied power dynamic of her having to be my friend, the list might as well end there. “There, there,” I said soothingly, playing it up as best I could. “It’ll be okay.”

“The idea of the charted path,” she muttered, lifting her head just enough to be clearly heard, “is to start with the community. You get a tour for a sense of place, and then dinner in the refectory for a sense of the people.” She lifted her head, leaning back and sighing. “And then you sleep in your house, and the morning is filled with everyone at work and all the littles obnoxiously at play, and the difference between morning and afternoon shows you the balance of things, and then we talk about delve-taxes and crafters’ loans and taxes on merchanting profits. You know, after you’ve seen the delvers and the Guard training, and after you’ve taken a tour of Hammer and the shop-houses.”

I gave her as cheerful a grin as I could, but it wasn’t all that; it was starting to hit me how different everything here was going to be, and how out of my comfort zone I was. “That does sound like it would have been more sensible.”

I was not, by any means, accustomed to being out of my comfort zone in anything but very controlled ways. Hiking with a compass, a plan, and people who were aware of where I was and when I expected to be in contact again, yes. Living in an entirely new culture?

Something of my emotions must have showed on my face, because Kelly’s face shifted from a sort of despondent, aggrieved look to a smug cheerfulness. “Well. James did say that this would be a job worthy of a Feat, and I can see why. It’s one thing to read about it; it’s another to do it. There’s so much to tell you about, so much to teach you! And I bet you’re already feeling overwhelmed. Especially since the questions you’ve asked have given you a lot of information you can’t really integrate properly, because you skipped the foundations.”

It was kind of offensive how thoroughly she was cheering me up just with that smirk of hers, but I let the snickering chuckle show through anyway. “Yeah. I’m not the kid who used to sit for hours figuring out some new absolute bullshit strategy in a game, or the no-longer-a-kid who could read a worldbuilding bible and actually get it. So let’s… prioritize, like you said, if we don’t have enough time to go back to that charted path you mentioned?”

“Right, we don’t. At this point, with as many times we’ve been distracted, we don’t have time to walk through Hammer and most of what I’d want to show you it’s going to be too late for. So… I usually prioritize for feeling like I know what’s going on with the next thing I’m doing. I could tell you about what dinner’s going to be like?”

“Honestly, I’d rather hear about what my next meaningful or major decision is going to be, and what I need to know about it. Not,” I said quickly, “that I think social interaction and eating food isn’t meaningful. But I’m not going to be able to do much about my social habits in one evening, and I’ll eat whatever is on offer. So… the next big thing.”

“Your Class tier-up.” Her response came instantly, and with complete confidence. “There’s no way you don’t have a max-level Tier One, you’re twice the age we are when we tier up from Worker.”

“I have Worker at 10, which the System says is maxed, yeah.”

“Then you’re eligible to tier that up to Tier Two, if you have Classes unlocked. In a long-term way, that’s gonna define your Path, as far as the System goes. Plus, that’ll give you a second Attribute, and you can’t get your second Class until you have your first Class at level 10 again.”

“Level 10 again?”

“Tiering up resets your level and raises your level cap. Anyway! That’s not just your first big decision; it’s the biggest, in a way. I mean, it’s not like it locks you into what you’re doing forever, that would be awful, but…”

“But it’s big.”

Kelly nodded, and then spent a moment opening and closing her mouth, visibly trying to decide on what to say. “What kind of life,” she eventually asked, “do you want to live?”

I giggled at that, and giggled harder at her inquisitive look. The look developed a pout, and I raised my hands in surrender. “No! No, not the puppy-eyes! It’s just that, um. Artemis asked me that question before sending me here, more or less.”

“And what did you—wait, Artemis.” She frowned at that. “Why do I recognize the name?”

“I dunno? Protector of girls, Goddess of the Hunt and of—”

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“You were sent here by a Goddess?”

“Yes?” She was boggling at me, and for all that I had no reason to, I felt myself going red in the face. “What? How else was I supposed to get here? Get hit by a truck?”

“I know for a fact,” she said with the first display of open displeasure I’d seen on her, “that you haven’t been to the Thousand, and that would have been the very first place we’d have gone if you’d told me that. And in fact, it is where we are going now.” She made a tapping gesture towards my forehead, and I flinched from it instinctively, even though she was nowhere near making contact. 

I didn’t quite fall off the bench, and she didn’t seem to notice. She rose, and I didn’t; that, she definitely noticed.

“Sophie, this is not a joke. Grace given is grace returned, as the Gods say; they are involved, they have expectations, and one of those is that when they act, we take note and show our gratitude in the appropriate ways, using the appropriate forms.”

Something about her tone had me standing—grudgingly, made more grudging by almost twisting my foot somehow as I got up—and Kelly set off towards a path that ran between two quints. “I don’t understand. He said that we were square, no debts owed! And I offered to pour one out for him—”

“That’s nice, but walk—”

“—and he said,” I continued, glaring at her interruption, “that grace given is grace returned like you just mentioned. I thought that meant I could focus on my life until it was time to, like, do something meaningful—like dedicating a craft—”

“Sophie, please.”

The layers of emotions in that single word brought my words to a dead halt. Displeasure and anger, I was used to, and certainly impatience; a plaintive worry, though? Genuine hurt? That cut through my defenses like they weren’t there, slid right past all of my armor and habits and history.

Noticing the anger led to letting it bleed out, flowing through me and leaving only a cold lump in my stomach behind, and I sighed as I walked up to her.

“Sorry,” I said quietly. “That was rude of me.”

“Thousands Abounding, Sophie, I can already tell you’re oxheaded sometimes, even though you know you’re new to here.” There was a slowly fading anger written in the lines of her body, and I could tell that it was the remnant of a genuine, if fleeting, fury; tension all the way down from her neck to her balled fists, head slightly ducked, face scrunched and skin the tiniest bit blotchy with redness. “But just… walk with me, and you can finish that thought? It’ll take us some minutes.”

“Sure.” I took a deep breath, letting half of it out as we started walking slowly down the path. “I did say I’d trust your judgment when you say we have something to go over. Might as well trust you when you say we have something we should do, too.” That got me a weak grin, not that mine was any stronger. “I don’t like doing… meaningless, performative shit, I guess. Just seems like a waste of time. For me and for whoever I’m doing it for.”

Kelly nodded slowly, making thinking noises and rubbing her forehead. “I don’t understand how this is even a question for you. She said to you—no, wait, you said he, is this Artemis fluid or of multiple presentations?”

“No, that was her brother, or half-brother, I guess; Artemis is—”

“Two. Travelers!” She sighed, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. I cut you off.”

“It…” I started to say it doesn’t matter, but it did, actually, in at least one sense the phrase could be taken, and possibly in the other, too. “She’s the Goddess of the Hunt, and a bunch of other things. Protector of women and girls, mostly. Her brother’s a crafting God, Hephaestus. He… rebuilt me, I guess, or they both did.”

“And yet you—I mean, you have the words—ah, no, that’s not the way.” She stopped walking, going from rubbing her head to running her hands through her hair. “Did you ever live with anyone? A lover, a friend?”

“No.” She raised an eyebrow at me, which I took to mean a request to elaborate. “I got a room of my own at the… academy, since they didn’t have any rooms in the dormitory. When I enrolled in my apprenticeship of studies—” there really wasn’t any better term for it, not in any of the languages I now knew— “I got another room of my own, an even smaller one, and then when that ended and I began my professional life, I saw no reason to lose my privacy.”

“There is something we call the habit of grace.” She started moving again, steps slow as she spoke, like she was lost in thought. Her voice was a lot more formal than it had been before, like she was paraphrasing a paper or something. “It is the habit of gratitude, in a sense; to thank each other, to show appreciation, even for those things which are duties or which are routine and mundane. We see each other through this, acknowledge the time and effort that goes into all the deeds of the day.

“So too do we speak to the Gods. We return their grace by showing grace of our own. That is the meaning of the phrase this Hephaestus spoke. The alternative is the Theurgist’s Path; to take as though those things are your due, as though the habit of gratitude is unimportant.”

“Huh.” I mulled on that for a bit, matching her pace and probably her level of distraction. “Still seems a bit performative. Why should—I mean, it is our due, in a sense? My job is something I owe, consideration is something we all owe each other. If I lived with someone and we were splitting chores, I’d owe it to her to, I dunno, sweep the floors, and she’d owe it to me to clean the bathroom. I wouldn’t want the, like, performance of being thanked; I’d want her to do her share of the work.”

We were both quiet for a little while as we walked, approaching the vegetable gardens I’d seen from the road. “It isn’t really about the other person, or about what you’re thanking them for,” Kelly finally replied. “The habit of grace is about you, because how you act changes how you are. Kindness, gratitude, respect, consideration; we practice them so that they’re more a part of us.”

“That rankles,” I said, voice soft. “An obligation that I owe someone for them doing what they said they’d do, what they owed? I don’t like it. But thanks for telling me anyway.”

“You’re welcome! How easily grace comes to you.”

She beamed at me and I spluttered, some of my dour mood leaving me. “That wasn’t—I didn’t—hey! Rude. Rude!”

“Come on. Let’s get to the Thousand so that we can make it back in time to eat. And Sophie?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for listening. Eventually.”

Her smile took some of the sting out of her words, but only some of it, and I swallowed through a bit of thickness in my throat. “You’re welcome. And I’m sorry.”

She nodded at that and sped up, and I followed obediently in her wake.

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