Chapter Five — The Merchant’s Son

Hanno sent three names by the morning. Veros read them at the table while Irela was out at her master’s. Two of the names belonged to merchants who had died within the last year, which made them useless; Veros needed a face he could be seen wearing in Karath today without producing a sighting that contradicted the man’s actual whereabouts. The third name was a Driftborn trade-factor who worked a copper route between the southern atolls and the Iron Coast. The factor was at sea three seasons of the year and in Karath perhaps twice annually. He was not in Karath now.

Veros knew the man’s face. He had not worn it, but he had once sat two benches away from him at a harbour tavern and watched him for an hour and a half while a different errand had required Veros to hold still. The face was stored. The face was retrievable.

Three hours of wearing, give or take. He did the calculation and did not flinch from the number.

He wrote to Hanno a note that said approved and sent it by the runner.

——— ◇ ———

The Tannath compound stood on the inner road of the Upper City, behind a stone wall the height of two men. A secondary gate on the market side admitted tradesmen in the hours between the dawn-bell and the turn-bell. The main gate admitted no one without an appointment.

Veros came to the main gate at mid-morning wearing the face of a man who had arrived from the Iron Coast the night before. The man had business with the Tannath copper office and was calling without an appointment because — as Veros said to the doorman — his letter ahead had evidently been lost in transit.

“The letter would have come three days ago,” Veros said, in the accent of the factor, in the register of a Driftborn trade-man who had spent enough years on Anchored business to have learned that Anchored delays were often lies. “I will wait. But I will wait where the Tannath office can see me waiting.”

The doorman was a professional. He looked at Veros. He looked at the seal ring Veros had produced from the inner pocket of the factor’s coat. The ring had come from a bag in Veros’s own cabinet. It had belonged to the factor’s father and was therefore three years out of date — but still recognizable. The doorman told Veros to wait inside the gate. He did not tell him to wait in the street.

Veros waited.

Ishmen Tannath came out to him after perhaps twenty minutes. That was the thing Veros had been counting on. A Driftborn trade-factor who had flown a flag for the copper office in the atolls for six years — and who was standing uncomfortably in an Anchored gatehouse — would be fetched by the junior heir. Not left to wait for a clerk.

Ishmen was in his early forties. He had his father’s cheekbones and a mother’s mouth. He wore the Tannath grey without the pin of a house-head, which meant Orvos had not yet formally transferred the title. He was courteous. He was not warm. He offered Veros a cup of water and no tea, which was the merchant-class Anchored language for I expect this meeting to be brief.

“You have come far for a letter that was not answered,” Ishmen said.

“I have come far because the matter my letter described is one that should not be answered by correspondence.”

Ishmen’s eyes did a small calculation. “And the matter is.”

“A consolidation of copper routes under a single factor. The factor in question would be me. The houses in question would include yours.”

“A bold proposal from a man whose letter was lost.”

“A bold proposal is the only kind that justifies the sea distance, sir.”

Ishmen permitted himself a small smile, which was not warmth but was an acknowledgment of the performance. He sat down. He gestured Veros to sit across from him.

“Tell me,” Ishmen said, “what you think the copper market will look like in three years.”

Veros told him.

It was not information Veros had researched. It was information the factor would have known, and Veros had once overheard the factor speak to another factor about it for long enough to remember the shape of the argument. He gave Ishmen the argument. Ishmen responded the way a merchant-class heir responded when a subordinate had read the market better than he had expected. He spoke in half-sentences for a while, testing Veros for the size of his information. Veros let the half-sentences be half-sentences and did not fill them.

It was in the half-sentences that Ishmen told him what he had come to hear.

“We have family matters,” Ishmen said, in the middle of a different paragraph about warehouse leases, “that will resolve within the season. A consolidation would be better placed after the resolution than before it.”

“Family matters of a kind that affect copper rights.”

“Family matters of a kind that touch on old scrip.”

“I am not a man who presses into family matters.”

“I thought not. That is a reason I am speaking with you at all.”

They looked at each other.

“My father is unwell,” Ishmen said. “He has been unwell for the better part of a year. There are questions of succession that are, in the ordinary way, settled before a man’s death rather than after. They have not yet been settled. They will be, before Siol.”

“I understand.”

“Certain redemptions exist that would revert, were they to be claimed, in ways that would be inconvenient.”

“Redemptions from twenty years ago.”

Ishmen’s eyes came to rest on Veros’s face, and for a fraction of a breath Veros held the Driftborn factor in the mirror of his concentration against the pressure of the direct look. The face held. Ishmen saw what he expected to see.

“A man from the atolls who reads our local scrip that closely is a man who has done his preparation,” Ishmen said.

“It is twenty years of scrip and some of it is known outside Karath.”

“Yes.”

“The inconvenience,” Veros said.

“The inconvenience is not large in the scale of our holdings. But Orvos — my father — prefers a clean table to a mostly clean table.”

“An heir exists.”

“An heir may exist. If an heir exists, we would prefer to settle the redemption without Compact court, because Compact court is slow and makes records that outlast the settling. We have a house that handles such matters for us. A younger investigator has been pursuing it with some energy.”

“And if the heir does not wish to be settled.”

Ishmen looked at his water cup. “There are cleaner outcomes for everyone involved than a refused settlement.”

“I see.”

The word killing was not spoken. It did not need to be. The shape of the thing was clear: the Tannaths would offer the Rellyn daughter a sum of money to drop any claim, and if she refused the sum, they would kill her. The investigator they had hired was staking her career on finding the heir and producing her for settlement. They would pay her on delivery. She had eight weeks of work done. She needed some number of weeks more until she reached the answer. If she delivered the heir to the Tannath house, the settlement would occur. If the heir refused settlement, the settlement would become a killing. If the investigator failed to deliver, she did not get paid.

That was every part of the answer Veros had come for. None of it had been spoken plainly, and all of it had been spoken — in the half-sentences, in the unreturned glance, in the precision with which Ishmen had said cleaner outcomes instead of the word he meant.

They spoke for another quarter-hour about copper. Ishmen promised a fuller meeting in Veren. Veros thanked him for his time and stood. Ishmen stood. They did not shake hands, which was the Anchored convention for a meeting that had gone well enough that neither party wanted to test the other’s grip.

The doorman showed Veros out.

——— ◇ ———

He walked three streets north of the compound before he dropped the face.

He chose an alley between a cooperage and a shuttered fish-smoker. He stood against the wall and let the factor go. It came off slower than yesterday’s pensioner had come off. A moment of greyness in the periphery of his vision. Then it was him in his own body again.

His knees both gave a complaint this time, not only the left. He leaned against the wall and breathed for a moment. His hand went to the wall and came away damp; he had not noticed himself sweating.

A beggar had been watching from the cross-alley. An older woman, thin, a blanket over her shoulders. She took in Veros’s face and his hand on the wall and his weight against the cold brick, and she did not come closer or call out. She watched for another breath. She looked away.

Veros was grateful she had looked away. He did not have the bearing to make a beggar’s day better right now. He did not have the bearing for anything but the walk home. He would do it slowly. It would take him twice as long as it had taken him from the counting-house on the afternoon Irela had first noticed he was walking slower.

He did not know, now, how many more wearings he could afford. He had a number in his head, and he knew the number was wrong by several days in either direction — and he understood, standing in the cold of the alley with his back against a brewer’s wall, that the wrongness was the point. He could no longer count what he had left with the precision he had once counted what he was about to spend. The calibration had drifted. He was working blind on the side of the ledger that mattered most.

He knew the shape of the threat. That was what he had come for.

Ishmen would not be stopped by a killing. Ishmen was the signature on the paper; Orvos was the money behind the paper; the Telvir house was the hand of the paper. Removing any one of the three still left the other two, and the other two had the resources and the time to reconstitute the same situation within a month. Killing Ishmen now would also break the one protection Irela had — the Tannaths did not yet know where to find her, and a death in the family would have them turning every Karath stone for the heir who had ordered it.

A cleaner way existed. He would need documents. He would need Maren Telvir to not reach her answer for several more days. He would need to wear four or five more faces.

He would need to spend, from his remaining years, a number he did not yet want to name.

He pushed off from the wall.

——— ◇ ———

The walk home took forty minutes.

When he came through the door Irela looked up from the long bench. She did not ask him whether he had aged again. She stood up, walked over, and put her hand on the side of his face. Her palm was warm. His face was cold. The pattern was the same as last night, and the sameness of it told her — without his saying anything — that what was happening was not a single bad day but a thing he had begun to do, and would do again, and was going to keep doing.

“Tell me what you are doing,” she said. “All of it. Tonight.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

He nodded.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER FIVE.