She turned the bowl of her pipe down to keep the water from putting out the tobacco and stepped into the street. The house was a thousand times easier to find than the passage had been. The green-painted walls and yellow eaves reminded her of toys that a child might play with. She stood outside for a long moment, then sighed, marched to the bound-oak door, and rapped the iron knocker against its strike plate.
It was almost a full minute before the little viewing window squeaked open and a Timzinae woman’s dark eyes appeared.
“Who the fuck are you?” the woman demanded.
“I’m here to see Callon Cane,” Clara said.
“You’re off your head, then,” the woman said. But she didn’t laugh. There was no hesitation in her voice. Nor surprise. Any uncertainty that remained in Clara’s mind evaporated in that moment and she smiled.
“I’ve come through danger to see him,” she said. “And if you don’t let me through, I can swear he’ll be dead or taken before the week’s out. And likely you will too. Now open the door.”
The woman blinked and slammed the window shut. Voices came from the other side. The Timzinae woman’s. A man’s voice, so deep he was likely one of the eastern races. Clara wished she could hear well enough to make out the words. A cart rattled by behind her, iron wheels against cobblestones. The sound almost covered the scrape of a bar being lifted.
The door opened. The rooms within were gloomy and dim. A huge Tralgu with a bare blade in his hand and half his ear missing stood aside and motioned her in. Clara had the sudden visceral memory of the Tralgu who’d been her own door servant, back in some other lifetime.
“I’ve come to see Callon Cane,” she said again.
“Your thumb.”
“They don’t take women.”
“All the same. Your thumb.”
Clara held out her hand, suffered the prick of the blade against it. The Tralgu leaned close to examine her blood, then made a satisfied grunt.
“You’ll have to leave the blades,” the Tralgu said. “Both of them.”
Clara didn’t ask how he’d known she wore two, only drew them from their sheaths and handed them over, hilt first. The Tralgu seemed satisfied with that. The woman was gone, and Clara felt sure that she was being watched from places she didn’t know.
The bare drawing room looked out over a narrow courtyard, rain running down the window glass like the world weeping. The makings of a fire were laid out in the grate, unlit. The man standing at the window was little more than a silhouette. His greatcoat might have been black or brown. His battered hat sported a wide brim. He was perhaps six inches taller than Clara, perhaps six shorter than the Tralgu guard, who took his place silently behind her. He could have been anyone.
Likely that was the point.
“You don’t know me,” Clara said. “And for reasons of my own, I won’t tell you who I am. I have come to warn you. The forces of Antea know you are here, and they have a way to move soldiers into the city. You must leave at once or else…”
The man turned. His face was bloodless, pale, and aghast. Clara felt the world shift beneath her.
“Mother?” Barriath said, sweeping the wide hat from his head. “What are you doing here?”
She stood stunned for a long moment. When the laughter came, it was like a fountain and it would not stop.
Cithrin
Komme Medean sat still, his calm radiating a rage so profound it made the stone of the walls, the wood of his desk, even the air itself seem fragile. His son, Lauro, stood behind him looking distressed and confused but uncertain what he should say, and his daughter, Chana, sat at a side table, her face carefully empty. Cithrin sat across from the soul and name of the holding company in the seat usually afforded to guests. Even Chana’s husband, Paerin Clark, was not welcome for this meeting. The blackwood door to the office was barred from the inside, and all the servants had been sent away. If Cithrin started screaming, no one would hear her.
Cithrin felt a pang of anxiety in her belly, but she could bear it. When she smiled to herself, it felt almost like excitement.
When Komme spoke, he shaped each word on its own, giving the syllables a careful and equal weight.
“This is the greatest fraud in history.”
“This is a goldmine that will never run dry so long as there is ink,” Cithrin said.
Lauro’s voice was thin and angry. He was older than Cithrin, and she could see that he knew he was supposed to be outraged without being entirely certain why. “You gave away our money.”
“I did not,” Cithrin said. “I changed the form of it. From coins and bars to letters that represent them and a royal proclamation that will give those letters the force of law. And exclusive rights to issue those letters in the name of the bank.”
“You gave our gold to the king,” Lauro said. “We’ll never get the gold back.”
“Exactly,” Cithrin said. “Neither will anyone else.”
“But—”
“Lauro,” Komme said. “Be quiet. You’re out of your depth.”
“You gained us nothing,” Lauro went on, talking over his father. “So you can write letters against the debt. So what? How does that gain us anything?”
Cithrin smiled. “We can write letters of transfer totaling more than the debt we’re owed.”
Lauro opened his mouth, then closed it. “No we can’t,” he said. “The debt’s only a certain size. If you write letters for more than that—”
“A debt that will never be repaid can be whatever size we say it is,” Cithrin said. “If we choose to put out letters for twice that sum, what difference will it make to the crown? Tracian was never giving up the coin anyway. We all know that. The merchants we’re working with probably know that, but there’s a royal order to pretend otherwise. If we need to pay someone from outside the kingdom, we can buy more gold at discount. Give the seller letters of transfer worth five tenthweights for every four tenthweights they provide. Who wouldn’t take that exchange?”
“And that makes it fraud,” Komme said. “Without gold—”
“Gold,” Cithrin said, waving her hand. “What’s gold? A metal too soft to take an edge. There’s no power there. What makes gold important is the story we tell about it. All of humanity has agreed that this particular object has value, and then because we all said so, it does. The metal hasn’t changed. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t bleed. It is what it was before. All we’re doing is telling that same story about some letters we’ve written.”
“You are advocating that we tell people these letters can be exchanged for actual gold,” Komme said. “You are obligating the crown to a greater debt than what we are owed—”
“And it doesn’t matter, because that debt will never be called,” Cithrin said. “An obligation isn’t an obligation if no one truly expects it to be met. And in the meantime, we can create markets that run on letters and do all the same things as markets that run on coin. Only now, instead of minting new currency by toiling in a mine and running ore through a smelter, we write it. If we need more money, we make it.”
“But we can only write letters for the amount we are owed,” Lauro said, almost plaintively.
“Lauro!” Komme snapped. “Be quiet!”
“Antea can be beaten,” Cithrin said. “The war can be brought to a halt. But it requires a great deal of money. More money than we had. Now we can decide now how much money we have. How much money there is to be had. We can hire mercenaries of our own. Pay the ones working for Geder to break their contracts. We can offer the farmers in Birancour and the southern reaches of Northcoast better prices for crops like cotton and tobacco, and when Geder’s armies come, they’ll starve. We can pay bounties. We can hire ships to carry weapons to Borja and the Keshet and arm Antea’s enemies there. All it takes is money.”