Chapter 36: A Merchant Who Knows Too Much

Alden yelped and nearly went into the crate.

"Gods' teeth, Osric"

"Try that again," Osric said, without raising his voice at all, "and I'll see whether that hand fits up your nose."

Bacchus did not miss a beat.

"Please. Let the man look." His eyes were bright with it. "But only with his eyes, if he is fond of his fingers."

"I was looking," Alden said, rubbing his scalp. "Not lifting."

"Looking very hard," Doran murmured.

Argilac had not been diverted by any of it. He was still on the merchant.

"You spoke of the court," he said. "What of the council here? Twelve chairs, or nine, depending who's counting, and they hold more sway than the Count's seal, or so I've heard."

Bacchus turned from a tray of silver rings, and his smile went courteous and a shade more careful.

"Auenstadt's council." He adjusted a cuff. "A quilt of old houses, new money, and sharp knives. Polite in public and treacherous in the dark. But you knew that already."

"You've had dealings."

"Only the briefest. Enough to know they watch everything and forget nothing. A man in my trade treads carefully where coin and pride are married to memory."

Osric had gone quiet, and had been watching the merchant rather than the wares for some little while.

Better groomed than most nobles I've stood in front of. Sells blades he could get twice the price for two hundred miles south.

He's not here for the money. And I'll not find out what he is here for by asking, so let's see what he'll spend on us.

"Trade's good, then," he said, easily. "Rich city."

"Rich city." Bacchus inclined his head. "Getting richer. And that, since you have not asked and I am going to tell you anyway, is the single most interesting fact about Auenstadt this year."

"Go on."

"There is more silver in this square than there was in the spring." The merchant said it as he might have remarked on the weather. "Not more coin. More silver. The coin here is stamped in this city, and I have been taking it in and passing it out for nine weeks, and it is heavier than it was."

Osric did not follow, and said so.

"When a mint is honest, its coin holds its weight, year on year, and every man in ten kingdoms trusts it and nobody thinks about it at all." Bacchus turned a ring over in his long fingers. "When a mint is dishonest, the coin gets lighter. That is the crime, entire, and it is as old as coin itself. A little less silver, a little more base, a penny here, and the difference goes into somebody's pocket."

"And here it's heavier."

"Here it is heavier." He set the ring down. "Which is the opposite crime and a much stranger one, and I have been in this trade twenty-two years and I have seen it exactly twice."

"What does it mean?"

"It means somebody is putting more silver through that mint than the ledgers say is going through it," said Bacchus. "It means there is metal coming into this city with no paper attached to it, and it has to go somewhere, and coin is where you put it. A man cannot sell a hillside of unrecorded ore. He can stamp it and spend it and it looks exactly like everybody else's money."

Osric stood very still in the middle of a market square with his thumbs in his belt.

The western range. Prospecting rights under royal seal, nine years back. Waldric said it in the hall and I let it go past me because it was a lawyer's detail.

He did not follow it any further than that. It sat where it landed, and he left it there, and would come back to it later at a bad hour.

"You're telling this to four soldiers," he said.

"I am telling it to four soldiers because it is not a secret, it is simple counting, and any merchant in this square who weighs his takings could tell you the

same, and about nine of them could." Bacchus smiled faintly. "The difference is that they will not, because they are all making money out of it and none of them wishes to be the man who said so aloud."

"And you?"

"I am leaving in the spring." He spread his hands. "And I find I like being the man who says things aloud. It is one of very few pleasures left in the trade."

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Argilac was watching him narrowly.

"So who rules this city? Truly. The council, or the ones paying their debts?"

Bacchus's gaze lingered a moment.

"Power here is not held," he said, more quietly. "It is passed, whispered, purchased. Never shown. The nobles own the land, the merchants own the city, and the guilds own the people, and not one of the three moves unless all three nod together." He straightened and brushed an imaginary fleck from his shoulder. "And if you were wondering: yes, they loathe the Count. But they hate one another quite as much. So all is well. For now."

He turned toward a fresh customer in a swirl of dark fabric, and then paused.

"One further courtesy, since you have bought nothing and asked for nothing, which in this square makes you nearly unique." He did not lower his voice, which was somehow worse. "When you go before that council, watch the fifth chair on the left as you come in. Ottokar Reiss. Wool, river tolls, and a face like a closed ledger. He will say nothing for two hours."

"And?"

"And if at any point Reiss looks at the ceiling, then whatever is being discussed has already been decided elsewhere, and you are watching a play." Bacchus smiled. "I lost four hundred marks learning that. You may have it for nothing."

They stepped back into the noise of the square.

"That one gives me the itch," Doran muttered.

"Too smooth," said Argilac.

"Too honest about lying," said Alden, still rubbing his head.

Toman, who had said nothing for the entire exchange, spoke up as they came out of the row.

"Is it true? About the coin?"

Osric looked down at him.

"You've been selling hides in this city for two days. You tell me."

The boy thought about it, and Osric watched him do it, and watched him get somewhere.

"They paid me in city coin," Toman said slowly. "Both of them. And the second man weighed his purse before he handed it over, which I thought was him being careful of me." He frowned. "He weren't being careful of me, were he."

"No," said Osric. "He was being careful of the coin."

They left the market at a wandering pace, out of the press and into wider lanes lined with timbered shops and brick warehouses and the distant clamour of smiths and coopers at work. Banners hung limp from iron poles above shuttered guild halls, their heraldry faded, mute testimony to prestige that had gone somewhere else.

Osric said very little.

They came to a broad intersection where a lane ran off toward the north.

He knew, without having to ask anybody and without ever having been told directly, that the coppersmiths' row lay at the end of it, because he had looked at a city plan in a captain's chamber four years ago for an entirely different reason and had never managed to unlearn it.

There was smoke going up over the rooftops that way. Several columns of it. Any one of them might have been a forge and most of them were.

He stopped walking.

"Serjeant?" said Doran.

Alden and Argilac had gone on three paces before they noticed. Argilac turned round.

He looked at his father, and then along the lane, and then back at his father, and did not say one word.

Osric stood at the corner of that intersection for the space of about four breaths.

Then he turned and went on down the main street toward the cathedral quarter.

"Nothing," he said. "Come on."

Argilac fell in beside him and let it lie, which cost him something, and Osric knew perfectly well what it had cost him.

Osric went out walking after supper because he could not sit still in a rented room, which had been happening to him more often in the last year and which he had decided not to examine.

The night air of Auenstadt was cool and damp and smelled of smoke and wet wood and, under it, the eternal reek of horse dung and city rot that no amount of fine paving had ever shifted. A few lanterns still burned along the stone lanes and threw their orange up the faces of the buildings.

He did not take his cloak. It was not cold enough to matter, and the weight on his shoulders had very little to do with the weather.

He walked without aim at first, letting his boots go where they liked. Past slanted rows of merchant houses with carved lintels and polished shutters. Through a small square where a preacher stood on a crate declaiming to nobody at all with tremendous conviction. Along the outer wall of a silent chapel where moss crept up the stones like patient fingers.

The city was still awake at that hour, which Valmarch never was. A pair of drunkards went past arm in arm howling some half-remembered song about war and wine. A pack of boys chased a dog through an alley with wooden sticks. Somewhere behind a curtained window a lute was being played, slowly, and not badly.

He turned down a narrower street and found himself outside a timber-framed tavern with a sagging sign: a stag with its antlers set crooked, in a way that might have been a joke about the carpenter and might have been a joke about the county.

Roast meat and sour ale came out through the cracks in the shutters.

He went in.

The warmth hit him first, smoke-heavy and thick with sweat and spice. The room was dim and lit by tallow and a central hearth crowded round with boots and tankards. Dice clattered in a corner and were followed by a groan and then a laugh. At one table two men arm-wrestled with their arms locked and trembling while coin changed hands round them. A bard plucked a lyre near the back, more ornament than musician, his voice entirely lost in the noise.

Soldiers sat hunched over their drinks in clusters. Some city garrison, some clearly mercenary, the colours and emblems a patchwork of fractured loyalties and empty purses.

Osric moved past all of it and found a seat along the far wall with his back to the stone and his eyes on the room, which was where he sat in any room he did not own.

A serving girl came by, wide-hipped and tired-eyed. He asked for whatever was warm and cheap and got a mug of bitter ale that foamed over the rim, and drank deep, and let the heat of it settle in his gut.

The bitterness stayed.

Not from the drink. From something else he could not name and did not much want to.

He watched the room laugh and wager and boast, and the voices bounced off the timber beams like echoes out of another life. A simpler one, where the fights were clean and the dead stayed buried and a man did not spend a market morning being told what a mint weighs.

He had drunk about half of it when the merchant found him.

"I would not have taken you for the sort to drink alone."

Osric turned his head slowly. Bacchus stood at the end of the table in the same dark silken layers, a serpent brooch at the shoulder, smelling faintly of myrrh and woodsmoke.

"Didn't take you for a tavern sort at all."

"Even I must descend from the heights of refinement now and again." He did not wait to be asked. He pulled out the bench opposite and sat, brushing imaginary dust off his sleeve. "I was walking to my lodgings and saw you come in here like a hunted fox. Thought I would pay my respects."

"You thought wrong."

"And yet here we are."

Osric let him have it. He was not going to win that particular exchange and had no great appetite for trying.