Within, the counting house was less gloomy than she’d expected, lit by clerestory windows and filled with potted ivies and violets on the edge of bloom. A man about Marcus Wester’s age—beginning to thicken and grey, but not yet old—with skin the color of polished mahogany leaned out of a door she hadn’t seen.
“Help you?” he asked.
Cithrin held up the books as if they were a ward against evil.
“I’ve brought the reports from Porte Oliva,” she said. Her voice was tight and high. She gave thanks she hadn’t squeaked.
“Ah, you’ll want the holding company. It’s three streets north and one west. Use the gate on the west side.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then, “Are you Magister Nison, then?”
A degree of interest came into the man’s expression.
“I am.”
“Magister Imaniel used to talk about you,” she said, forcing herself to smile.
It wasn’t truth. She’d taken his name from the papers and books that had come with her from Vanai. But Magister Imaniel was dead. Cam was dead. All the people who could say otherwise were gone from the world, and so the truth could be whatever she wanted it to be. And right now, she wanted it to be that she and this stranger shared a connection, however slight.
In less than a heartbeat confusion gave way to surprise, and surprise to amusement.
“You’re bel Sarcour, then,” Nison said. “Wait just a moment.”
He vanished again, and she heard his voice calling for someone, and another man’s voice calling back. The accent of Carse was fast and clipped, and the only words she could make out were old man and tomorrow. Not the most informative.
He stepped back into sight wearing a cloak of undyed wool and a smile that didn’t seem entirely benign.
“Let me escort you, Magistra,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
If the counting house had been modest, the holding company more than made up for it. Five stories high, it looked less like a building within a city than a fortified keep of its own. The unglazed windows were thin as arrow-slits and the roof had decorative stonework that could easily act as ramparts. Nison guided her through an iron gate and into a courtyard like a palace’s. A fountain chuckled and burbled, and incense wafted from windows covered by intricate carved shutters. Servants or slaves had washed the paving stones until there seemed to be neither dirt nor dust anywhere in the yard. He led her into a wide, airy chamber of brick and tapestry and from there up a stairway that curved with the wall to a doorway of oak inlaid with ivory and jet.
It made sense that the holding company would have greater wealth than any of the branches. It was, after all, the reason to have a holding company rather than simply a central branch of the bank. The profits and losses from any individual branch—her own, Magister Nison’s, or any of the others—were specific to that branch. They rose or fell on their merits, and all of them paid into a separate business that was the holding company, which gave out no loans and accepted no deposits, but rather mediated the flow of gold between the branches. No one outside the bank held a contract with the holding company or Komme Medean. If Cithrin gave out too many insurance contracts before a war or a bad storm season, she could bankrupt her branch, but her debt ended with her. No one could make claim from this building or from any other branch. In fact, depending on the situation, the holding company might be among the creditors she would suffer to repay.
It seemed little more than a told story, but it was a fiction that made this house a port of safety for wealth and her own an engine of risk. She knew all this and understood it as she knew her numbers and letters. Only she had never before seen it in practice. Silently, she began to recalculate her branch and its worth in terms of the doors and fountains, tapestry and incense. Her head swam a little.
The woman who opened the door to Magister Nison’s rapping was dressed in a dark robe of fine cotton and had her sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Cithrin smiled and nodded, totally unsure whether she was seeing a woman of the highest status or a well-dressed servant and trying to land somewhere that would offend neither one. At her side, Magister Nison nodded his head in her direction.
“Magistra bel Sarcour just in from Porte Oliva. She’s brought the reports. I thought Komme might like to meet the girl with the biggest balls in Birancour.”
“Actually, I’m from the Free Cities,” Cithrin said. “Originally.”
It was idiotic, but the words spilled out of her mouth as if she’d planned them. The dark-robed woman lifted an eyebrow.
“He’s a bit under the weather,” the woman said. “It’s a bad day.”