‘Oh, quite,’ Athli said. ‘Well, I suppose I’d have to be an idiot to turn down an offer like this. About payment, though – will that be in advance or arrears? I’m sorry if that sounds fussy, but…’
‘There’s no need to apologise for a firm grasp of the essentials of your profession,’ Fesal replied. ‘In advance for the first month, in arrears after that. We believe that’s a reasonable compromise. Is that acceptable?’
‘Method of payment?’
‘By letter of credit,’ Iqueval said, ‘drawn on the provincial office, redeemable wherever you choose to specify. In your case, I assume, in Shastel; you can then write it directly to yourself here.’ He smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few of your compatriots elect to have their payments written to Shastel, which ought to be good for business. You may care to put arrangements in hand, though of course it’s not for me to tell you how to run your franchise. Still, with the Loredan Bank gone, there aren’t that many banks outside the Empire for people to choose from.’
And only one inside the Empire, Athli didn’t reply. Instead, she said, ‘That’ll be fine. And yes, I’ll be happy to arrange exchange facilities for anybody else who wants to use us, though with the sort of money you’re talking about floating around, it’ll be quite an undertaking. I’ll probably end up having to lay off some of the credit with other people here on the Island.’
Fesal stood up. ‘You’re going to be busy,’ he said. ‘Well, thank you for your time. We’ll be in touch when we’re ready to make a start. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.’
‘Likewise.’
When they’d gone, Athli spent a fascinating few minutes with her counting-board and tablets, first making the calculations and then checking them three times to make sure she wasn’t making some elementary mistake that made the sum she’d be due to receive seem much larger than it should be. But it worked out the same each time; good money, indeed.
So they’re going to attack Temrai, are they? She should be pleased; delighted, in fact, that the monster who destroyed her home and butchered her people was only a few months away from defeat and death. The good man loves his friends and hates his enemies; wasn’t that what she’d been taught as a child? My enemy’s misfortune is my good fortune – confound it, if they’d come to her and asked for the loan of her ship, free of charge, for a holy war against the plainspeople, that’d have been straightforward enough; Yes, she’d have said, with my blessing. But this way, revenge and a substantial profit – somehow she wasn’t sure the world worked like that.
Not that a substantial profit would go amiss; not if her poor Fencer was at the bottom of the sea, and Gannadius and his nephew with her. Even if they were still alive, lost somewhere between the Empire and Temrai, chances were she’d never see them again. She found it hard, almost impossible, to feel anything about that; not because she didn’t want to, but simply because she couldn’t. When Perimadeia had fallen and she’d come here, she’d started making herself armour, good armour proof against such things – a helmet of business, a breastplate of friends, pauldrons (whatever they were) of possessions, success, prosperity. When she’d taken Bardas Loredan aboard the Fencer to visit his brothers in the Mesoge, and had come back with his sword and his apprentice but without him, she’d closed up the rivets and planished the exterior, making this armour of hers good enough to pass any proof; the death of an old friend and the boy Loredan had given her to look after were blows she acknowledged but couldn’t actually feel. That’s the merit of good armour; the blows either glance off the angled contours or waste their energy against the internal tensions of the metal, which are so much more powerful than any force likely to be applied from the outside. To be good armour, to be proof, it must have its own inner stresses, those of constricted metal trying in vain to push outwards, so that pressure inwards is met, force against force, and repelled. She had those internal tensions, those inner stresses; now here was an act of proof, and look, her armour had turned the blows easily. The prospect of some money, some business, an opportunity to find more clients and increase her prosperity had quite taken away the force of the attack.
So that’s all right, then. As for her ship, her poor little ship, the Son of Heaven was quite right: it was insured, so heavily that it was a wonder it had ever managed to float under all that weight of money. Once the insurers stopped squirming (only a matter of time, plus a certain amount of effort) she’d do rather well out of the loss of the Fencer.
Well, of course. That’s what insurance is for, to turn the blow. And if she hadn’t been expecting, deep in the darker galleries of her mind, to lose it some day, she probably wouldn’t have called it the Fencer in the first place.
Being an orderly, methodical person (by practice if not by nature) she made a note of her meeting with the Sons of Heaven, filed it in the proper place and went back to reading the report, which was, of course, all about armour. She managed to get to the end of the seventh section before her eyes filled with tears, making it impractical to try to read further.
‘Really?’ Temrai stopped what he was doing and looked up. ‘Perimadeians? I didn’t think there were any left.’
‘A few, here and there,’ the messenger replied. His name was Leuscai, and Temrai had known him for years, on and off. How someone like Leuscai came to be running errands for the engineers building siege-engines down on the southern border he had no idea; chances were that he simply hadn’t wanted to get involved. It was a problem with a lot of his contemporaries; though they’d never have considered supporting the rebellion, let alone joining it, they weren’t happy with the direction Temrai seemed to be leading the clans in, and they manifested this unease by taking part as little as possible. It was profoundly irritating, to say the least. But Temrai couldn’t be bothered to raise the issue with an old friend like Leuscai; it’d probably result in falling out, bad temper and the end of a friendship, and he had few enough of those left as it was.
‘Oh, well,’ Temrai said. ‘Now then, how does this look?’
‘Unintentional,’ Leuscai replied. ‘That is, I wouldn’t insult you by thinking you meant it to look like that.’
‘That bad?’ Temrai sighed. ‘I’m getting cack-handed in my old age, that’s what it is. It’s not so long ago I was able to earn my living bashing metal around.’
‘In Perimadeia,’ Leuscai pointed out, ‘where presumably their standards weren’t so high. All right, put me out of my misery. What’s it supposed to be?’
Temrai grinned. ‘There’s a technical term for it,’ he said, ‘which escapes me for the moment. But basically it’s a knee-guard. Or rather it isn’t.’
‘Not unless you’ve got really unusual knees,’ Leuscai agreed. ‘But it’s just as well you told me, or I’d never have guessed. To me it looks like a slice of harness leather pretending to be a pancake.’
‘Yes, all right.’ Temrai let the offending item fall from his hand. ‘It’s frustrating, really,’ he said. ‘While I was in the City, I read about how you’re supposed to do this, and they made it sound really easy. You just get thickish leather, you dip it in hot melted beeswax, you shape it, and there you are; cheap, strong, lightweight armour, made out of something we’ve got lots of. I don’t know,’ he went on, sitting on the log he’d been using to beat the thing into shape over. ‘Making things used to come so easily to me, and now I seem to have lost the knack. Anyway, tell me more about these stragglers of yours. Any idea who they are?’