The King's Blood(28)

“That’s not—”

“Now you get the status in the eyes of the city, you get to call yourself the voice of the bank, you get the nice clothes and the food and the shelter, and you get it all on my back. They can’t fire you until all the poisoned contracts you signed are purged and replaced with something we could enforce. It’ll take years. Me, though? They could send a letter and turn me in the streets tomorrow. They won’t, but they could. You get all the carrot and none of the stick, and I do the job. That’s not enough? I need to like you too? You want to put your hooks in me like you’ve got ’em in your pet mercenary? Well, tough shit, kid.”

The notary went silent. Cithrin rose. She felt like she’d been punched, her body vibrating from the depth of the notary’s anger, but her head was clear and cold as meltwater. It was as if her body was the only thing frightened.

“I’ll leave you to your work, then,” Cithrin said. “If there’s anything I can do that would help the branch, please let me know.”

Pyk made an impatient click in the back of her throat.

“And, really,” Cithrin said, pointing to the pages laid out on the table, “don’t pay that list.”


C

ithrin walked through the streets in the southern end of the city nearest the port. The puppeteers were out in force, sometimes as many as three working different corners when two of the larger ways crossed. Many were variations on old themes: retellings of PennyPenny the Jasuru with his bouts of comic rage and violence or stories of cleverness and crime with Timzinae Roaches—often with the three black-scaled marionettes tied to a single cross, their movements literally made one. Other times, the stories were of greater local interest. A story of a crippled widow forced to sell her babies only to have them each returned as too much trouble to keep could be just a comic tale with a few bawdy jokes and a trick baby puppet that grew monstrous teeth, but to the residents of the city it was also an elaborate in-joke about a famously corrupt governor. Cithrin stopped in an open square to stand and watch a pair of full-blooded Cinnae girls— paler and thinner even than her—singing an eerie song and swaying with marionettes in the shapes of bloodied men. She noticed the girls had filed their teeth to sharklike points. She wasn’t sure if it was more frightening or pretentious. It was certainly a large personal investment for an effect that limited the range of performances they could do.

Cithrin mulled over how much of the performer’s craft relied on excellence in a small range and how much on competence over a wide variety of performances. It was, of course, a single instance of a more general problem, and it could be applied to the bank as well. A certain range of contracts— insurance and loans and partnerships and letters of credit— required relatively little additional expertise. To widen the business into renting out guardsmen or guaranteeing merchandise in bank-owned warehouses required more resources and higher expenses, but it also brought in coin that wouldn’t have come in otherwise.

The Cinnae girls struck a series of high, gliding trills, matching each other in an uncomforting harmony. The one on Cithrin’s left swirled, her dark skirts rising with the motion to show blue-stained legs. Cithrin saw it and didn’t see it.

It wasn’t only her mutilated tusks that made Pyk like the sharp-toothed puppeteers. Pyk also wanted to limit what the bank did, restrict it to the few areas in which she was comfortable and then increase her profits by reducing cost. Excellence in a narrow circle. It was safe and it was small and it was absolutely against Cithrin’s instincts.

“Magistra,” Marcus said. She hadn’t noticed him walking up behind her.

“Captain,” she said. “How are the guards?”

“We lost a few,” he said. “That Yardem and I took the worst pay cuts pulled the punch a little. Still, I’m keeping either me or Yardem at the main house until people stop being quite so sour about it. I’d hate to be the captain whose guard stole the safebox.”

The Cinnae girls scowled, their voices growing a degree harsher at the interruption. Cithrin dug out a few weights of copper and dropped them in the open sack between the performers, then took Marcus’s arm and walked west, toward the seawall.

“I’m not going to win her over,” Cithrin said. “Not ever. It isn’t just that we dislike each other. We disagree.”

“That’s a problem.”

Cithrin felt her mind at work. From the time she’d been old enough to know anything, her world had been the bank. Coins and bills and rates of exchange, how to set prices and how to exploit prices that others had set poorly. It was what she’d had growing up instead of love.