A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 290: Chapter 281 — Guild Zero I

The message came in on a Thursday morning while James was arguing about a chair.

Nyra wanted the good one moved into the back room for Alice, on the grounds that Alice was a guest. Alice had pointed out that she had lived there for two and a half weeks and had therefore stopped being a guest. Nyra had said that was exactly the sort of thing a guest would say.

James’s phone went on the table.

**Roisin Kavanagh:** *Weekly update attached. Contractors are on schedule for the residential wing, though ”schedule” is doing some work in that sentence. Office fit-out has slipped a week; nobody cares. Server migration finished Tuesday.*

*The licensing-critical works passed final inspection this morning.*

*All five of you. Headquarters. Two o’clock.*

James read it.

Then he read it again, from the top, slower, the way you check a bank balance you do not believe.

The kitchen carried on for about four seconds without him.

”—and anyway it’s *my* chair, Mum said it was my chair when we got it, so if I *lend* it to somebody that’s—”

Alice stopped talking.

She had not been looking at him and she noticed anyway, which was a thing she did.

”What is it.”

”Inspection passed.”

”Which inspection?”

”The one that lets us open,” said James.

---

The building had a car park with cars in it.

That was the first thing.

He had been coming here for eleven weeks and every single time it had been skips, a generator, four vans and a portaloo, and today there were staff cars parked in marked spaces with a barrier arm at the entrance that lifted for him without anybody getting out of a hut.

He stood on the pavement for a second and looked up at the front of it.

The stone above the door was clean.

Not carved, not branded, nothing installed — Maeve had been very clear that nothing went above that door until the day they announced, and today was the day they announced, and the sign was apparently still in a crate. But the pale ghost of the other guild’s crest, the outline burned into weathered stone by twenty years of somebody else’s rain, had been taken off with the rest of the dirt.

There was just stone up there now. Clean, blank, waiting.

James went in.

The reception was working.

There was a woman behind the desk on a phone. There were two contractors signing something in a folder. There was a lad in a hi-vis walking through with a length of trunking on his shoulder, and a security officer in guild black who looked at James’s face, then at his screen, then at James’s face again, and said, ”Afternoon, Mr Ganner. Strategy room’s third floor, the lift’s live now.”

The lift was live.

Eleven weeks ago James had climbed those stairs in a torch beam past a wall with water coming through it.

---

He took the long way.

Past the north half of the training hall, where the floor had been ripped out to the joists in June and was now forty metres of sprung timber with the lines already painted on it, and two men fitting the last of the wall padding.

Past the vault, where the door stood open and the old electronics had been stripped out of the frame entirely and replaced with a panel that lit when he came within a metre of it.

Past the fire panel by the stairwell, green across the board, with a certificate in a frame beside it that somebody had hung slightly crooked.

Past the rear corridor to the private entrance, where the door was closed and the reader beside it glowed a steady red.

And past the medical section.

James stopped there.

The doors were on. The floor was down and sealed and the lights were in, and two people in overalls were manoeuvring an examination table off a trolley while a third stood over an open crate reading an instruction booklet with visible despair.

Ronan had asked for that. Months ago, in Finn’s strategy room, when they were listing what mattered — *if it’s a choice, do the medical before the bedrooms.* Nobody had argued and nobody had made a thing of it and it had gone on the list.

The bedrooms upstairs still had contractors in them.

The medical rooms had equipment.

James went up.

---

They came in one at a time over about ten minutes.

Maeve was already there, of course, at the far end with a tablet, having arrived at half twelve. Ronan came up the stairs rather than the lift because Ronan did not trust a lift he had not seen tested. Cillian arrived last and loudly, having got lost on the second floor, which he blamed on the second floor.

Finn came in, looked around the room, and said nothing for a second.

The strategy room worked.

That was all it was. Screens live along the north wall. A table with five chairs at the head of it and room for more. A guild system running quietly on all of it — rosters, floor records, the clear log going back to Floor 1 with five names on the first line of it.

The last time James had stood in a room like this, it had belonged to Marcus Hale.

Kavanagh was at the top of the table with two folders and no coffee.

”Sit down, all of you, this takes six minutes.”

---

It took four.

”The licensing-critical works passed inspection at ten past nine this morning. Structural, fire and safety, access control, vault security, the private entrance and the north training floor. Those were the six things a licence could not issue without.” She turned the first folder round and slid it. ”The final filing went in at half nine. It was accepted at eleven forty.”

She put the second page on top.

”That’s your operating licence. Guild Zero Limited is licensed to operate from this address, effective today.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Cillian leaned forward with his elbows on the table.

”So does this mean I own seven and a half percent of an actual building now.”

”You own seven and a half percent of Guild Zero Limited, which owns the building.”

”But there’s a building.”

”There’s a building.”

”Because up until roughly forty seconds ago,” Cillian said, ”I owned seven and a half percent of a very impressive stack of invoices.”

”You still own that as well,” said Kavanagh.

”Grand. Lovely. Thank you.”

Maeve had not smiled at any of it, and she put her tablet flat on the table.

”So we can announce.”

That was the sentence.

James watched it land on her before it landed on anybody else, because she had been the one holding it — *we don’t announce a guild until we know what that building needs, when a licence can actually issue, and who our first hires are* — and she had held that line through three months of everybody else wanting to talk.

”Yes, you can announce,” Kavanagh agreed.