“My thanks, but I can make my own way. I wouldn’t want to have the thing wind down halfway there and have to carry it back.”
Davario’s turn to frown, an expression of annoyance, quickly gone. “I see you’ve been listening to gossip, Prince Jalan. It’s true much of the city’s clockwork is winding down, but we have our own solutions here in the House Gold. You’ll find we’re a progressive organization-the sort of place a keen young trader like yourself might fit in. Consider keeping your business in-house and we may have a good future together, prince.” He pulled from just beneath the lip of the desk what looked like a drinking horn attached to some kind of flexible tube, and spoke into it. “Send in the beta-soldier.” Davario nodded toward the door. “You’ll see something special here, Prince Jalan.”
The door swung open on noiseless hinges and a clockwork soldier walked in, smaller than the one that led me to the office in the first place, its gait smoother, a porcelain face instead of the side-on view of brass spacing plates and clockwork that lay behind the first soldier’s copper eyes and voice grille. A man came in behind the soldier, presumably the technician responsible, a white-faced and humourless fellow in the tight-fitting blacks and peculiar headwear of a modern.
“Show our guest your hand, beta,” Davario said.
The construct raised its arm with a whirr of meshing teeth and presented me with its left hand, a corpse-white thing, in every regard human save for its bloodless nature and the fact that brass rods slid into the flesh behind the knuckles and moved to flex and curl the fingers.
“The clockwork pokes around a dead hand? Did you buy some beggar’s hand, or rob it from a grave?” The thing turned my stomach. It gave off no discernible aroma but somehow made my nose twitch with revulsion.
“Donated to clear a debt.” Davario shrugged. “The bank will have its pound of flesh. But you’re wrong, Prince Jalan. The rods don’t drive the hand. The hand pulls on the rods and winds secondary springs within the torso. Not as efficient as the Mechanist clock springs, but something we can build and repair, and adequate for mobility if constantly rewound by flesh augmentation.”
The white fingers before me curled into a fist and returned to the soldier’s side.
“But the hand is. .” The hand was dead. “This is necromancy!”
“This is necessity, prince. Necessity spawning invention from her ever-fertile womb. Need breeds strange bedfellows and those who trade in a free market find all manner of transactions coming to their door. And of course it doesn’t stop with just a hand or a leg. The whole exoskeleton of a clockwork soldier can. . potentially. . be clothed in cadaverous flesh. So you see, Prince Jalan, you need have no fears for the security and vigour of House Gold. The last of the Mechanists’ work may indeed be winding down, but we, we are winding up, gearing for a bright future. Your great-uncle’s investments and trades are safe with us, as are those of the Red Queen.”
“The Red Qu-”
“Of course, Red March has been at war or on a war footing these past thirty years. Some say west would be east by now if it weren’t for the Red Queen sitting in between them and saying ‘no’ to all comers. And that’s all well and good, but a war economy consumes rather than generates. Umbertide has financed your grandmother’s war for decades. Half of Red March is mortgaged to the banks you can see from Remonti Tower just across the plaza at the end of the street.” Davario smiled as if this were good news. “By the way, allow me to introduce Marco Onstantos Evenaline, Mercantile Derivatives South. Marco has recently been appointed to help audit our Red March account.”
The modern standing behind the abomination that Davario seemed so proud of offered me the thinnest of smiles and watched me with dead eyes.
“Charmed,” I said. All of a sudden I wasn’t sure which unnerved me most, the monstrosity of corpse and metal before me, or the white-faced man standing in its shadow. Something was seriously amiss with the man. A coward knows these things, just as the cruel and violent have an instinct for seeking out cowards.
Without further remark Marco led the clockwork soldier from the room.
“He’s a banker then, this Marco?” I asked as the door shut behind them.
“Among other things.”
“A necromancer?” I had to ask. If the House Gold were extending the use of their clockwork soldiers by means of such crimes against nature then I had to wonder who was doing the work for them and if the Dead King had his bony fingers in their pie.
“Ah.” Davario smiled and showed his small white teeth, too many of them, as if I’d made a witticism. “No. Not Marco. Though he has worked closely with our practitioners. Necromancy is an unfortunate word with overtones of skulls and graveyards. We’re much more. . scientific here, our practitioners adhere to strict guidelines.”
“And what of Kelem?” I asked.
The banker stiffened at that. A nerve touched.
“What of him?”
“Does he approve of these. . innovations? Of your practitioners and their arts?” I really wanted to ask if Kelem owned half of Red March but perhaps I didn’t want to hear the answer to that question.
“Kelem is a respected shareholder in many of Umbertide’s institutions.” Davario inclined his head. “But he does not control the House Gold nor make our policy. We are a new breed here, Prince Jalan, with many profitable associations.”
Davario took a piece of parchment from his drawer, heavy grade and cut into a neat rectangle. The thing had been marked all over with precise scrollwork and an exquisitely detailed crest of arms. He took his quill and wrote “100” in a clear space near the middle, signing his name below.
“This is a credit note for one hundred florins, Prince Jalan. I hope it will be sufficient for your needs until your great uncle’s paperwork is certified.” He slid it across the desk to me.
I picked it up by the corner, and shook it as I might a suspect letter. It hadn’t any weight to it. “I do favour cold currency. .” I turned the note over, the reverse decorated in more scrollwork. “Something more solid and real.”
A small frown creased the flesh between Davario’s eyes. “Your debts aren’t currency, my prince, and yet they’re every bit as real as your assets.”
My turn to frown. “What do you know about my debts?”
The banker shrugged. “Little more than that they exist. But if you sought to borrow money from me I would know far more about them by sunset.” His face became serious and despite our civilized surroundings I felt little doubt that in the matter of collecting what might be owed to the House Gold Davario Romano Evenaline would be no more inclined to show mercy than Maeres Allus. “But I wasn’t talking about your debts: it’s your Uncle Hertet’s debts that are the stuff of legend. He’s been borrowing against the promise of the throne since he came to his majority.”
“He has.” I managed to stop the words becoming a question. I knew the heir-apparently-not liked to spend and had several ventures on the go, including a theatre and a bathhouse, but I had assumed that the Red Queen indulged him in recompense for her failure to either be a doting mother or to die.
Davario returned to his theme. “Debts are very real-they’re not hard currency but they are hard facts, my prince. This note is a promise: it carries the reputation of the House Gold. The whole of Umbertide, the whole of finance, runs on promises, a vast network of interlinked promises, each balanced on the next. And do you know what the difference is between a promise and a lie, Prince Jalan?”
I opened my mouth to tell him, paused, thought, thought some more, and said, “No.” I’d uttered plenty of both and the only difference seemed to be the side you looked at them from.
“Well and good, if we ever found someone who did we might have to kill them. Ho ho ho.” He spoke his laugh, not even pretending humour. “A lie may prove true in the end, a promise might be broken. The difference might be said to be that if a person breaks one promise then all their promises are suspect, worthless, but if a liar tells the truth by accident we don’t feel inclined to treat all their other utterances as gospel. The promise of this note is as strong, or weak, as the promise of every bank in this broken empire of ours. If it breaks, we plunge into the abyss.”