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That night in my room at Madam Joelli’s I dreamed of Hennan, running scared across a dark and stony field. It seemed I chased him, getting closer and closer until I could hear the ragged panting of his breath and see the flash of his bare feet in the moonlight, dark with blood. I chased him, hard on his heels but always out of reach—until I wasn’t and I reached forward. The hands I caught him with were hooks, black metal hooks, cutting into his shoulders. He screamed and I woke, sweating in the black night of my room, finding his scream my own.
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I spent several days watching the ebb and flow of things across House Gold’s trading floor and made a few trades, small bets against the price of olives and salt. Salt is traded on huge scales, a seasoning for the rich but an essential preservative to everyone else, and despite Umbertide having a salt mine in the hills that could be seen from its walls, the city still imported significant amounts of the stuff from Afrique. Once I had the feel for the mechanics of the business, I moved on.
I graduated to the Maritime Trading House, a large sandstone edifice fashioned rather like a domed amphitheatre and situated on the edge of an extravagantly green park near the middle of the city’s financial quarter. I call it a quarter but it’s closer to two-thirds.
Each day from first light to midnight crowds of the wealthiest men in the Broken Empire gather within the airy confines of the Maritime House and shout themselves hoarse while runners, normally young men with quick minds and quicker feet who hope one day to be doing their own shouting, carry trades back and forth. It’s not so very different from betting on fights back at the Blood Holes in Vermillion, except the fights are just the differences of opinions about the value of cargoes being brought into various ports by ships which the vast majority of the traders will never see or care to see. Ships with the most distant destinations and which have gone unsighted the longest time attract the largest odds. Perhaps that ship will never be heard of again; perhaps it will turn up in three weeks laden with nuggets of raw gold, or barrels of some spice so exotic we don’t have a name for it, just an appetite. Ships about which some information is available—maybe a sighting a month back by another captain, or some word that it was fully laden with amber and resin when inventoried off the Indus coast in the spring—those ships are safer bets, with lower odds. And you don’t even need to wait until your ship comes in to take your profit or endure your loss—any bet can be sold on, perhaps at considerable gain or perhaps for far less than it was purchased, depending on what new information has come to light in the interim, and how trustworthy said information is.
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For my first two weeks I bounced along, breaking even by the second. Despite my natural flair for gambling, good head for figures and excellent people skills, even swinging the sizeable financial stick that my great uncle’s ships represented, I couldn’t quite beat out a profit. Some might say that working the markets is a science, a trade that takes years to learn as you build your networks and develop understanding of the various trading domains. To my mind though it boiled down to wagering, albeit at the largest casino in the Broken Empire, and what I really needed was a system. Also more sleep. Between the long hours and the recurring dreams of Hennan meeting one grim end after another, I was wearing myself thin.
Week three found me nearly two thousand florins to the good and back at House Gold depositing my collection of certificates of sale. I still had to wait in line, intolerable on two counts, firstly no prince should have to stare at the sweaty back of another man’s neck and wait his turn—unless of course that man is a king, and secondly I sincerely doubted any of those ahead of me would be bringing quite such wealth to the counter, and surely any sensible bank should give priority to the rich.
I’d made most of the money on an arrangement to buy harbour space in a Goghan port. By the complex magic of my system I wouldn’t actually have to do the buying until much later on. Never, if I timed my exit from the city properly. A cough to my rear startled me from my contemplations.
“Prince Jalan, how are you enjoying your time in Umbertide?” The mathmagician I’d met on my first visit joined the queue behind me. He wore a striking robe of interlocking shapes, alternately black and white, a pattern that both fascinated the eye and told you the man’s home lay very far from here.
“I . . .” The fellow’s name escaped me but I covered it up pretty well. “Well, thank you. Profitable shall we say, and that’s always enjoyable.”