“Where is your party stationed out of?” asked Mergan.
“Pucklechurch, for now,” said Alfric.
Mergan nodded. “So there’s a good chance that you’ll be dealing with me on a somewhat regular basis, unless you end up more west. Well, the thing you need to know about books is that their worth depends largely on what’s inside them. There are entads for translation, and I have one, but the market is pretty small, mostly made up of specialists and hobbyists. Six hundred books might make you a fortune, if they’re the right ones, or they might only be good for washing the pages clean and writing something else there. With six hundred, that would still make you a good amount, but there’s no one in Tarchwood who does that work, which means that if I bought them, I would have to ship them off to somewhere else. Beyond that, I’d be the one taking a risk, so your price would be quite a bit lower. Now, I’m always looking for up-and-comers, and I hope we can have a relationship of some kind. I’m also hoping that if I do right by you, you do right by me. If we don’t get along, there’s another shop in Tarchwood that deals with dungeon things, though they’re more on the entad side, or you could go the other way, to Liberfell, which has its own buyers. All right?”
Alfric nodded. He appreciated the forthright information. “I’m more used to how things are done in Dondrian,” he said. “So any guidance you can give would be more than welcome.” From experience, he knew that some people would sit through a talk like that trying to keep themselves from sighing with boredom, but he had always been an eager sponge, appreciative of others sharing what they knew.
“Dondrian,” said Mergan, shaking his head. “I’d thought you might, given
your manner and the darkness of your skin.” It
Alfric looked at Isra. His skin was darker than hers and their features quite distinct, but he could see how someone might think that. Most of the people in this particular province of Interim were light-skinned, with a somewhat sizable contingent from Kiromo, and to them, he and Isra might have seemed similar.
“No,” said Isra. She almost seemed like she would leave it at that. “My parents immigrated from Tarbin, and I was born near Pucklechurch.”
“Ah,” replied Mergan. “Well, I’ll welcome you all the same. Good to have a local, to keep the city folk in line. You can feel free to look around while we talk about business. It’s mostly henlings and some dungeon art.” Isra stayed where she was while Mergan turned back to Alfric. “The books, then?”
Alfric pulled out the storage book and began removing the mundane books from it, stacking them up on the counter one by one. At first, Mergan just watched, but as it became clear just how long this process was going to take, he began looking through the books. He checked the spines first, then leafed through, though Alfric had no idea what he might be looking for. Once a hundred books had been removed, set into stacks of ten, Mergan used a key to open a small box on the counter and pulled out a monocle with a green lens, which he used to look at the books, largely focusing on their spines.
“About half of these are recipe books,” said Mergan. “Those are only worth the paper and the binding, raw material for some kind of magic or another. The recipes have measurements no one’s ever heard of, ingredients that might mean anything, all kinds of problems that make them a curiosity and nothing more. I think I’ve sold two over twenty years running this place.”
“That’s a shame,” said Alfric, who was continuing to pull out more books. He was going to be happy to see the end of this particular transaction. If the books turned out not to be worth much, there was little he could do about it.
“It’s the same for instruction books, manuals, all kinds of things,” said Mergan. “Gardening books for fruits and flowers that don’t exist, using tools that you’d have to make special, from someone who’s got different ideas about what soil is like, that kind of thing. Not all entirely worthless, but close to it, and hard to find a buyer.”
“What about the rest?” asked Alfric.
