‘Savine … dan …’ And she leaned even closer to deliver the punchline. ‘Glokta.’
If a name had been a knife and she had cut his throat with hers, the blood could not have drained more quickly from his face. He gave a strangled cough, took a step back and nearly fell over one of his own barrels.
‘Lady Savine.’ Majir was coming from an upstairs office, wooden steps creaking under her considerable weight. ‘What an honour.’
‘Isn’t it, though? Your man and I were just getting acquainted.’
Majir glanced towards the ghost-faced barman. ‘Would you like him to apologise?’
‘For what? Not being as brave as he claimed? If we executed men for that, I swear there wouldn’t be a dozen left alive in the Union, eh, Zuri?’
Zuri clasped Savine’s hat sadly to her breast. ‘Heroes are in lamentably short supply.’
Majir cleared her throat. ‘If I’d known you were coming all the way down here yourself—’
‘If I spent all my time shut up with Mother, we would kill each other,’ said Savine. ‘And I feel that business should be conducted, whenever possible, in person. Otherwise one’s partners can convince themselves that one’s eyes are not on the details. My eyes are always on the details, Majir.’
In low company, Savine could be low. These were bullies, so they needed to be bullied. It was the language they understood. Majir’s thick neck shifted as she swallowed. ‘Who would dare doubt it?’ And she laid a flat leather pouch on the counter.
‘It’s all there?’
‘A promissory note from the banking house of Valint and Balk.’
‘Really?’ Valint and Balk had a dark reputation, even for a bank. Savine’s father had often warned her never to deal with them, because once you owe Valint and Balk, the debt is never done. But a promissory note was just money, and money can never be a bad thing. She tossed the pouch to Zuri, who peered inside and gave the smallest nod. ‘It’s coming to something when even the bandits are using the bank.’
Majir mildly raised one brow. ‘Honest women have the law to protect them. Bandits must take more care with their earnings.’
‘You’re a darling.’ Savine reached across the counter to pinch her fat cheek and give it an affectionate tug. ‘Thank you, Zuri. You’re a darling, too.’ Her companion was already sliding the hatpin back into position.
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Majir, ‘I’ll have a few boys follow you out of the neighbourhood. I could never forgive myself if something were to happen to you.’
‘Oh, come now. If something happened to me, your own forgiveness would be the least of your problems.’
‘True.’ Majir watched her turn away, big fists pressed into the counter. ‘Do pass my regards to your father.’
Savine laughed. ‘Let’s not demean ourselves by pretending my father gives a dry fuck for your regards.’ And she blew a kiss at the terrified barman on her way out.
Dietam dan Kort, famed architect, was a man who gave every appearance of being in control. His desk, scattered with maps, surveys and draughtsman’s drawings, was certainly a wonder of engineering. Savine had moved among the most powerful men in the realm and still doubted she had ever seen a larger. It filled his office so completely, there was only the narrowest of passages around the edges to reach his chair. He must have needed help to squeeze himself through every morning. She wondered if she should recommend her corset-maker.
‘Lady Savine,’ he intoned. ‘What an honour.’
‘Isn’t it, though?’ She made him lean dangerously far across the desk in order to kiss her hand. Savine studied his, meanwhile, big and broad with fingers scarred from hard work. A self-made man. His greying hair was painstakingly scraped across a pate quite obviously bald. A proud and a vain man. She noticed a slight fraying of the cuffs on his once-splendid coat. A man in straitened circumstances, intent on appearing otherwise.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?’ he asked.
She settled herself opposite while Zuri whisked off her hat. A lady of taste should appear to make no effort. The right things simply happen around her. ‘The opportunity for investment you mentioned at our last meeting,’ she said.
Kort brightened considerably. ‘You have come to discuss it?’
‘I have come to do it.’
Zuri placed Majir’s pouch on the desk as delicately as if it had been deposited by a summer breeze. It looked very small on that immense expanse of green leather. But that was the magic of banks. They could render the priceless tiny, the immense worthless.
The slightest sheen of sweat had sprung from Kort’s forehead. ‘It’s all there?’
‘A promissory note from Valint and Balk. I hope that will suffice?’
‘Of course!’ He was unable to disguise a note of eager greed as he reached across the desk. ‘I believe we agreed a twentieth share—’
Savine placed one fingertip on the corner of the pouch. ‘You mentioned a twentieth. I remained silent.’
His hand froze. ‘Then …?’
‘A fifth.’
There was a pause. While he decided how outraged he could afford to be, and Savine decided how little to appear to care.
‘A fifth?’ His already ruddy face turned positively volcanic. ‘My first investors received half as much for twice the money! I only own a fifth myself, and I near as damn it dug the thing with my own hands! A fifth? Have you lost all reason?’
To Savine, there was no more enticing invitation than a door slammed in her face. ‘One man’s mad is another’s perceptive,’ she said, her smile not even dented. ‘Your canal takes a clever route and your bridge is a wonder. Truly, I congratulate you on it. In a few years, they’ll be building everything from iron. But it isn’t finished and you’ve run out of money.’
‘I have two months’ reserves!’
‘You have two weeks’ at best.’
‘Then I have two weeks to find a more reasonable investor!’
‘You have two hours.’ Savine sent her brows up very high. ‘I am visiting with Tilde dan Rucksted tonight.’
‘Who?’
‘Tilde, the young wife of Lord Marshal Rucksted. A wonderfully sweet-tempered girl, but phew, what a gossip!’ And she glanced up for confirmation.
‘It pains me to speak ill of one of God’s creatures,’ admitted Zuri, with a pious fluttering of her long lashes, ‘but she is an abysmal blabbermouth.’
‘When I confide, in strictest confidence, that you are short of investment, lacking the necessary permissions and troubled by restless workmen, it will be all over town before sunup.’
‘Sure as printing it in a pamphlet,’ said Zuri, sadly.
‘Good luck finding an investor then, reasonable or otherwise.’
It had only taken a moment for Kort to go from bright red to deathly pale, and Savine burst out laughing. ‘Don’t be silly, I won’t do that!’ She stopped laughing. ‘Because you are going to sign one-fifth of your enterprise over to me. Now. Then I can confide in Tilde that I just made the investment of a lifetime, and she won’t be able to resist investing herself. She’s not only loose-lipped, you see, but tight-fisted, too.’
‘Greed is a quality the priests abhor.’ Zuri sighed. ‘Especially the rich ones.’
‘But so widespread these days,’ lamented Savine. ‘If Lady Rucksted sees some gain in it, I daresay she can persuade her husband to make a breach in Casamir’s Wall so you can extend your canal into the Three Farms.’ And Savine could sell the worthless slum buildings she had bought on the canal’s likely route back to herself at an immense profit. ‘The marshal’s notoriously stubborn for most of us but to his wife he’s a pussycat. You know how it is with old men and their young brides.’
Kort was trapped halfway between anger and ambition. Savine rather liked him there. Most animals, after all, look better in a cage. ‘Extend my canal … into the Three Farms?’