The Mallory Reward

The Mallory Reward is the name given at Caldmere to a bill posted at the Parchmarket, and again at the gate of Thornwick, in the last days of Ashfall, 312 AS. It offers two hundred marks of good silver, no questions pressed, for "any metal of the old imperial forging, crown-metal above all", with pensions promised to any seller who can prove where the piece came from. It is not, by any reading the archive can make, an artifact; it is paper and ink. But the paper has set men moving, and the archive records it among the instruments of the age.

Terms

The bill is written in a notarial hand and signed by the steward of Osten Mallory, lord of the house at Thornwick. Its terms are unusual in two particulars. First, the undertaking that no questions will be pressed — a clause that invites thieves, and says so plainly enough that a careful reader understands the true buyer wants silence more than law. Second, the pension: an annual payment for life to any claimant whose provenance holds. Honest dealers in old metal do not offer pensions. A pension is paid for a witness who must be kept content, and close, and alive.

Two hundred marks is, for scale, the price of a good barge, or a year of a Mere Watch spearman's wages twenty times over. The standing reward posted by Master Oswin Prall for news of a shard of the Sundered Crown is of the same figure, renewed monthly at his own expense; whether this is coincidence, rivalry, or the Crown-men's agreed price for the same thing under two names, accounts differ.

Reading

Mallory's steward, questioned at Thornwick, swore the reward was a collector's whim before the Lord Regent dies and prices for old metal rise. Few believed him. House Mallory's mother-house has leaned Ardent for a generation, and the Crown-men — the party that holds no succession lawful until the Crown's shards are found — have been buying old maps of the Glassmere roads since Frostmonth. The bill asks for "crown-metal above all". The archive notes, without judgement, that the Crown was broken on the Sundering Night, that its pieces are lost, and that no lawful search for them has ever been funded by the Regency.

The Lantern-Wardens have declined three private commissions this season to escort "antiquarians" along the Glassmere's edge; the order will not enter the waste, and the refusal is written into its contracts, but the commissions offered were for the approaches only, and were refused all the same. The Mere Watch reports two paying parties turned back at its towers since the bill was posted. Whoever engages those parties pays better than the Watch does, and the Watch's spearmen, paid in arrears like the city watch, can be trusted to notice.

Nor is Mallory the only bidder. Sefa Morrow's correspondent in Saverra writes that a League factor has been quietly matching Mallory's offers through intermediaries — paying more, and asking less about provenance. The League already holds a watching brief on the Regency's debts; what use a bank has for old imperial metal, if it is only metal, the archive does not pretend to know.

Cautions

The archive would be failing in its duty if it recorded the reward without the warning that hangs on it. The last false shard brought to Caldmere was exposed as a forgery in 289 AS and cost a Thornwick goldsmith his hands; the men who carried it were never clearly named. Older archivists recall sellers of "crown-metal" who left the city lighter than their goods. A bill that presses no questions is a bill that plans, at need, to have none answered.

Take the work if you must. But count your fingers before you shake on it, and after.

Whoever takes this work takes sides in a succession that has not yet been declared open. The reward bill hung unchallenged at the Parchmarket for three weeks before it was taken down — renewed, witnesses say, rather than withdrawn, the terms unchanged save for a larger figure in a fresh hand. The archive will record what comes of it, if what comes of it is ever admitted.