One of the devices I’d gotten from home was in the form of a tube that fit snugly into my hand. I palmed it and leaned against the building. I placed the tube against the wall, and in a few seconds I was seeing the inside of the building, and in a few more seconds I was seeing it clearly enough to teleport; no one was looking at me, so I did.
There was a minor spell inside to detect sorcery, so I disabled it before doing a light spell, then I started looking around.
There really isn’t any point in going into the details. It was big, and it was empty, and there was a lot of small offices, two vaults, and a basement, and I looked at them all, and it took me about four and a half hours, and at the end of it I had a bag full of scraps of paper. The good news, or the bad news, was that I’d found right away a very large bin full of papers that they’d never gotten around to throwing into the stove—good news because it meant there was a lot of material, bad news because if any of it was important it would have been taken or destroyed. But I wasn’t the one who had to go through them all.
I kept them sorted just a bit, in case Vlad would want to know which ones were found where. I knew that most of them, probably all of them, would be worthless, but Vlad would be stuck with going over them, so I had no problem doing the collecting. When I was done, I teleported directly back to the cottage. Buddy, who was outside, started barking when I appeared, but settled down quickly.
“Hey,” I told him. “Don’t worry. I got the goods.”
He wagged his tail.
Vlad came to the door, probably in response to Buddy, and held it open for me. He said, “Well?”
I held up the sack full of papers. “Enjoy.”
“No problems?”
“None. How about the boy?”
“He started talking about knives again—this time without any prompting at all. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad. Maybe it’s both. And he’s sleeping an awful lot.”
I sat down. The boy was asleep. Hwdf rjaanci was sitting by him, quietly singing what sounded like a lullaby. Vlad accepted the papers. He seemed a bit startled by how heavy the bag was; he weighed it in his hands and whistled appreciatively.
“What did you find out?” I asked him.
“The banker was—or is—Lady Vonnith, House of the Orca, naturally. She owned the bank completely, according to the paperwork at City Hall, which may or may not be reliable. She’s also the ‘pointer’—whatever that means—for three other banks, one of which has gone under and the other two of which are still solvent, but both of which have issued a ‘Hold of Purchase’; again, whatever that is. She lives not too far from Endra.” He gave me the address.
“Okay.”
“What’s a pointer?”
“I don’t know where the term came from,” I said. “But it means she’s in charge of the business, she runs it, even if she doesn’t own it. At a guess, she gets a whomping big cut of the profits, or she’s a part owner, or, most likely, she’s the full owner under a different name.”
“Why do that?”
I smiled. “Because if one of her banks files surrender of debts, which just happened, she can keep running the others without the debts of one being assessed against the income of the others, which the Empire is supposed to do.”
“Oh. Is that legal?”
“If she isn’t caught.”
“I see. What is a Hold of Purchase?”
“It means the bank has the right to keep your money.”
“Huh?”
“It was a law passed in the twelfth Teckla Reign. It prevents everyone from pulling his money out all at once and driving the bank under. There are all sorts of laws about when it can be invoked, and for how long, and what percentage of their cash they have to release, and to whom, and I don’t really understand it myself. But it may mean they’re in trouble, or, more likely, it means that with banks going under they’re afraid of a general panic and they’re taking steps to prevent one.”
“They,” he repeated. “The owners of the bank, or the Empire?”
“The owners request it, the Empire grants it—or doesn’t.”
“I see. That’s interesting. Who in the Empire would they go to to get such an order?”
“The Minister of the Treasury’s office.”
“Who’s the Minister of the Treasury?”
“His name is Shortisle.”
“Shortisle,” said Vlad. “Hmmm.”
“What?”
“That name came up in Fyres’s notes, somewhere. Something about it struck me as odd, but I didn’t pay much attention, and now I can’t remember what it was. I guess they met for dinner or something.”
“Hardly surprising,” I said. “The Minister of the Treasury and a major entrepreneur? Sure.”
“Yes, but ... never mind. I’ll think about it. House?”
“Shortisle? Orca.”
He nodded, and fell into a reverie of contemplation.
“Is there anything else?”
“Huh? Yeah. Go home. I’ll go over your booty tonight, which should leave me with, oh, at least half an hour to sleep. Tomorrow you make contact with the banker and see what you can learn.”
“All right,” I said. “Should I check with you first, to see what you’ve found out?”
“Yeah. But don’t hurry—I want a chance to at least close my eyes and snore once before you show up.”
“Okay. Sleep well.”
He looked at the bag full of dusty scrap paper in his hand and favored me with a thin smile. Loiosh stretched his wings and hissed, as if he were laughing at us both.
When I returned in the morning, the table near the stove was filled with the papers I’d discovered, all neatly sorted into four stacks, and, if I remembered the quantity correctly, reduced by about three-quarters. Vlad had the bleary-eyed look of someone who had just woken up, and Savn was still asleep by the hearth, Loiosh, Rocza, and Buddy curled up with him. Buddy thumped his tail once, gave a dog yawn, gave a whiny sigh, and put his head down on his paws. There were pieces of charcoal on the floor, more testimony to Vlad’s state; the water was boiling, and I could see the klava tin next to it, and Vlad was staring at them like he’d forgotten what they were for.
I said, “What did you learn?”
He said, “Huh?”
“Make the klava.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“The water goes into the inverted cone sitting on the—”
“I know how to make Verra-be-damned klava.”
“Right.”
He completed the operation, not spilling any water, which impressed me, then he scowled at the floor and went looking for a broom. I said, “I take it it will be a while before I get my answers.”
“Huh? Yeah. Just let me drink a cup of this poison.”
“Poison? I thought you liked klava.”
“She’s out of honey,” he said, practically snarling.
“Back in a minute,” I said.
By the time the klava was done, I was back with a crock of honey, and Vlad said, “You must be sure to permit me to be cut into pieces for you sometime.”
“Been reading Paarfi again?”
“I don’t know how to read. In an hour, maybe I’ll know how to read.”
He put honey into the mugs, pressed the klava, and poured a little bit more than two mugs’ worth into two mugs. He cursed. I said, “I’ll clean it up.”
“I’ll also be immolated for you whenever you wish.”
“Noted,” I said.
Half an hour later he was himself again, more or less. I said, “Okay, what did you learn?”
“I learned,” he said slowly, “that either it takes a trained expert to learn things from pieces of scrap paper, or it takes an amateur a long, long time to look for a greenstalk in the grass.”
“In other words, you learned nothing?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say nothing.”
He was smiling. He’d gotten something. I nodded and waited. He said, “Most of it was numbers. There were a lot of numbers. I didn’t pay much attention to them, until I realized they probably meant money; then they caused me a certain distress. But that still wasn’t helpful. I haven’t thrown them away, because you never know, but I did set them aside.”