those territories without extraordinary returns. Cithrin didn’t know whether the lives of people displaced by war fell under the heading of extraordinary returns, but thought they might.
From a financial perspective, her own reports back were the collapse of an incompetent. The branch was losing money like a slaughterhouse pig bled. Ships hired for unspecified cargo. Caravan masters employed for half a dozen off-season trips into the Keshet. Cithrin gave out loans on almost any pretext with expectation of repayment to other branches and no way to track the borrower.
Which is to say that the bank’s mechanism had reversed. What had been an engine designed for the accumulation of wealth had become a system for wealth’s application. She could imagine herself as some sort of half-divine fairy changing the world where she wished to by the careful dispensation of gold and silver, contracts and letters of credit. The difference she made was measured not in weights of precious metal, but in some number of lives and in children living outside of prisons. And she could go on with this until the coffers ran dry, and even past that, working on deficit until even the reputation of the Medean bank wasn’t enough to keep her boards from being broken.
Some nights, she would stay up late and try to calculate her efficiency. How many hundred refugees had fled danger under her watch, and how much she had spent to do it. It occurred to her more than once that the Antean Empire had placed a low price on Timzinae lives, and that she had been the one in position to buy. Those were the best nights. The worst, she thought of other things.
The logic of the world had been inverted. Cheap lives were good. Money was there to be lost. Even the opportunities that came to her were suspect.
I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Cithrin said, shaking her head at the list of names on the page before her. “Look at these. Tamar Sol. She’s that old woman who lives beside the trading house, isn’t she?”
“I believe so,” Yardem said.
“What could she plausibly be doing for the bank? Darning our socks? And this one—Witan Adada? He’s the one with the missing leg who begs at that taproom.”
Yardem sat on the divan, nodding, his ears canted forward and his hands clasped on his knees.
“Many of them are vulnerable people,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re here for? To extend the protection we have to as many people as we can?”
“Our privilege isn’t built on stone,” Cithrin said. “When we give this list to the protector, it will be a list of people immune to his authority. But it can turn into a list of people to be singled out for persecution without folding a corner. The bank is a protection as long as we’re in Geder’s good graces. I’d no more single Tamar Sol out to the protector than I’d point a wolf toward a baby. I won’t list anyone as working for me who isn’t willing to be killed because I did it.”
Yardem grunted.
“Not the best recruitment speech,” he said. “Let me take that back, and I’ll see what I can do about revising it.”
“I’m sorry,” Cithrin said, holding out the page.
“No reason to be,” the Tralgu said.
The report had come in the day before. Cithrin’s scheme for an anonymous bounty board appeared to be moving forward. Komme Medean had included a list of prices being offered for a variety of crimes against the sovereign powers of Antea, the escape of slaves, the death of soldiers from common sword-and-bows to nobles. There was even a massive reward listed for Geder’s death. They were reported as rumors with a request that all the branches reply with whatever similar schemes they were hearing of. Even if the letters went astray or Cithrin found herself being questioned by one of the tainted priests, she could truthfully say that she didn’t have knowledge of the bounties being offered by the bank or anyone else in particular. Komme’s reports said that the prizes were to be collected in Herez from a shadowy figure named Callon Cane, and she could truthfully say that was all she knew for certain. She was cultivating her own ignorance. It was just another way in which the normal logic of her world had been reversed.
Yardem walked out to the compound’s central yard, and she accompanied him. The compound was still full of the refugees and guests that Isadau had welcomed in, or