and itemized by well-dressed men and women who weave webs of commerce across thousands of miles while sipping tea in the back rooms of countinghouses.
But there are also bandits, warned to be in places at certain times, to ensure that a caravan flying a certain merchant’s colors will vanish between destinations. There are whispered conversations, recorded in no formal minutes, and money that changes hands with no formal entry in any ledger. There are assassins, and black alchemy, and quiet arrangements made with gangs. There is usury and fraud and insider speculation; there are hundreds of financial practices so clever and so arcane that they do not yet have common names—manipulations of coin and paper that would have Bondsmagi bowing at the waist in recognition of their devious subtlety.
Trade is all of these things, and in Camorr, when one speaks of business practices fair or foul, when one speaks of commerce on the grandest scale, one name leaps to mind above and before all others—the Meraggio.
Giancana Meraggio is the seventh in his line; his family has owned and operated its countinghouse for nearly two and a half centuries. But in a sense the first name isn’t important; it is always simply the Meraggio at Meraggio’s. “The Meraggio” has become an office.
The Meraggio family made its original fortune from the sudden death of the popular Duke Stravoli of Camorr, who died of an ague while on a state visit to Tal Verrar. Nicola Meraggio, trader-captain of a relatively fast brig, outraced all other news of the duke’s death back to Camorr, where she expended every last half-copper at her command to purchase and control the city’s full stock of black mourning crepe. When this was resold at extortionate prices so the state funeral could take place in proper dignity, she sank some of the profits into a small coffeehouse on the canal-side avenue that would eventually be called (thanks largely to her family) Coin-Kisser’s Row.
As though it were an outward manifestation of the family’s ambitions, the building has never remained one size for very long. It expands suddenly at irregular intervals, consuming nearby structures, adding lodges and stories and galleries, spreading its walls like a baby bird slowly pushing its unhatched rivals from the nest.
The early Meraggios made their names as active traders and speculators; they were men and women who loudly proclaimed their ability to squeeze more profit from investors’ funds than any of their rivals could. The third Meraggio of note, Ostavo Meraggio, famously sent out a gaily decorated boat each morning to throw fifty gold tyrins into the deepest part of Camorr Bay; he did this every day without fail for a complete year. “I can do this and still have more fresh profit at the end of any given day than any one of my peers,” he boasted.
The later Meraggios shifted the family’s emphasis from investing coin to hoarding, counting, guarding, and loaning it. They were among the first to recognize the stable fortunes that could be had by becoming facilitators of commerce rather than direct participants. And so the Meraggio now sits at the heart of a centuries-old financial network that has effectively become the blood and sinews of the Therin city-states; his signature on a piece of parchment can carry as much weight as an army in the field or a squadron of warships on the seas.
Not without reason is it sometimes said that in Camorr there are two dukes—Nicovante, the Duke of Glass, and Meraggio, the Duke of White Iron.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ORCHIDS AND ASSASSINS
1
LOCKE LAMORA STOOD before the steps of Meraggio’s Countinghouse the next day, just as the huge Verrari water-clock inside the building’s foyer chimed out the tenth hour of the morning. A sun shower was falling; gentle hot rain blown in beneath a sky that was mostly blue-white and clear. Traffic on the Via Camorrazza was at a high ebb, with cargo barges and passenger boats dueling for water space with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for battlefield maneuvers.
One of Jean’s crowns had been broken up to furnish Locke (who still wore his gray hair and a false beard, trimmed down now to a modest goatee) with acceptably clean clothing in the fashion of a courier or scribe. While he certainly didn’t look like a man of funds, he was the very picture of a respectable employee.
Meraggio’s Countinghouse was a four-story hybrid of two hundred years’ worth of architectural fads; it had columns, arched windows, facades of stone and lacquered wood alike,