The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(118)
Most of the people at their lunch were moderns, driven like all of Umbertide by the ebb and flow of fashions that changed with bewildering speed. Where fashion pertained to garments the only constants in Umbertide style were that it would be uncomfortable, expensive, and not resemble clothing.
I looked down at the number again. I should let him stew while I finished my meal. Under ideal circumstances I should let the ungrateful urchin spend another month on stale water and scraps. I munched a quail’s egg, gazing out over the small sea of multi-tiered hats angled over plates. Apparently it was the fashion not to remove them to dine—at least for this week. I didn’t have a month though. The time had come to leave town and delaying even a day could prove risky.
With a sigh I pushed myself away from the table, placed a cut florin beside the main plate, and left. The gold secreted all about my person chinked quietly to itself and the excess, stowed in the case in my hand, did its best to pull my arm off.
The moderns watched me leave, eyes drawn by some instinct to the departure of so much capital.
? ? ?
Ta-Nam waited for me outside the Fatted Goose, at ease in the shade but not dozing. I could have hired six guards for the price I paid the sword-son but I judged him more deadly, and certainly more loyal to his coin, loyalty being the credo of the caste. They bred and raised men like Ta-Nam to this one purpose on some hellish isle off the coast of Afrique, far, far to the south. I had taken the mathmagician’s advice and secured the services of a sword-son as soon as I deposited my first thousand. The price of his contract left considerably less of it to guard, but even so I felt that Yusuf’s advice had been sound—a prince should have the best and his protection should make a statement about the worth of what’s being protected. In any event one of the beauties of Umbertide is the way that the magics of the market enable one coin to become many, floating on a network of credit, promises, and fiddly little calculations called “financial instruments.” Perhaps for the first time in my life I was in credit and could afford the best.
“Walk with me,” I said. “We’re going to prison.”
Ta-Nam made no reply, only followed. It took a lot to get an answer out of the man. Whatever their training entailed it took as much out of the sword-sons as it added, leaving them too bound to their task to waste time or thought on social niceties or smalltalk. I could afford to replace Ta-Nam with the city’s ultimate accessory by now—should I want to. I’d made a middle-sized fortune staking ships of the line, merchant vessels under Grandmother’s flag, against complex future options on cargo. With the wealth I’d accumulated I could afford most things. As poor a conversationalist as the man was, though, one of the region’s famous clockwork soldiers would hardly improve things on that front. And besides, though there might be no guard more competent, the Mechanists’ toys made me nervous. Just having one near me made my skin crawl. The constant whirring of all those cogs and wheels beneath their armour, grinding at every move, so many little teeth geared to each other, everything in motion . . . it unsettled me, and the copper gleam of their eyes promised nothing good.
Ta-Nam walked behind me as a guard that’s for protection rather than show always will, keeping his charge in sight at all times. Every now and then I’d glance back to check he was still there, my silent shadow. I’d yet to see him in action but he certainly looked the part, and the prowess of the sword-sons had been a thing of legend for centuries. Muscled for strength but not past the point where a price is paid in quickness, impassive, solid, watching the world without judgment. Darker even than a Nuban, his head shaved and gleaming.
“I don’t even know why we’re going,” I told Ta-Nam over my shoulder. “It’s not like I owe him anything. And he left me! I mean, of all the ingratitude . . .”
We made slow but steady progress. I’d come to learn the layout of the city in the weeks I’d spent here—despite most of my hours passing in the gloom of the exchange, bilking traders, playing the percentages, and lying from the hip.
Umbertide’s narrow streets and grand sun-baked plazas hold a mix of people hardly less unusual than its most upmarket restaurants. The ubiquitous black-cloaked messengers thread cosmopolitan crowds. The lure of the city’s wealth draws visitors from every quarter of the known world, most of them rich already. There are perhaps no other places on the map where you might find a Ling merchant from the Utter East at table sipping java with a Liban mathmagician and with them a Nuban factor draped in gold chain. I’ve even seen a man from the Great Lands across the Atlantis Ocean striding the streets of Umbertide, a lighter brown than the tribes of northern Afrique and with blue eyes, his robe feathered and set with malachite beads in mosaiced profusion. What ship bore him across the wideness of that ocean I never did find out.
The alley broadened into what might almost be called a street, bracketed on each side by plaster-clad tenements reaching five and six storeys, all faded and shuttered, cracked and discoloured, though inside the luxury would shame many a mansion and the cost of such an abode would beggar most provincial lords. Ahead a fountain tinkled at the crossing of two streets, though I couldn’t see it yet, just hear its music and sense the coolness.
“Prince Jalan.” The flow of the crowd thinned around me.
“Corpus Armand.” Formally I should name him to the House Iron but he’d already trampled protocol by not listing my family and domains. I glanced back at Ta-Nam—when a modern discards protocol you know it means trouble. A modern breaches etiquette the way an Ancrath murders your family, i.e. it’s not unheard of but you know it means they’re pissed off.