"Soren," Vesper said slowly. "How did you get this?"
Loraine. How much of the truth survives contact with that woman?
<<Loraine: Most of it. Not the part where you put a knife in a man's neck.>>
<<Lilith: She wouldn't care about that bit.>>
<<Loraine: She would care enormously. Not morally. Legally. A slave who kills is a slave without prior permission is dangerous and would be put down, and she would have to do it in front of witnesses whether she wanted to or not.>>
Right.
"The factor's called Petrin, my lady," Soren said. "He keeps two books. The honest one stays in the counting house because Vail needs real weights to sell against. The false one is what gets copied onto your sheet."
"And he simply let you take it?"
"No. He doesn't know it's gone yet."
Vesper's eyebrows went up.
"There's a man in that yard called Ost," Soren went on. "Big, shaved head, wears a Bindmaster's token he shouldn't. He's the one keeping Petrin frightened. He had a key to Vail's counting house on his belt."
"Had?"
"Rumour has it he went in the river Friday night, my lady. I don't know who by." Soren kept his voice completely flat.
"I know that his keys were on the towpath in the morning and that nobody had come looking for them yet."
It was, he thought, a genuinely good lie, in that it contained one sentence that was not true and multiple that were.
Vesper looked at him for a long moment.
Then she laughed, once, sharp and surprised.
"You stole a dead man's keys."
"I...I found them, my lady."
"You found them." She was grinning now. "You found them, and then you found a counting house, and then you found a book."
"That's about the shape of it."
"Soren." She sat forward and put both elbows on the desk. "That is the single most useful thing anybody in this house has done for me in two years."
Loraine, is she about to reward me or have me whipped? Because with her it's genuinely a coin flip.
<<Loraine: Wait...>>
Vesper turned a page.
Then another.
Then she got to the back of the book, where the columns stopped being about grain, and Soren watched the grin come off her face the way water goes off a roof.
The study got very quiet.
By the window, Sera Delacque said, "My lady?"
Vesper did not answer her. She turned the page again. Her thumb went down the column, stopped, went down further.
"These are names," she said.
"Yes, my lady."
"These are people..."
"Yes, my lady."
"Forty of them." Her voice had gone thin. "Forty people through Greyfen in fourteen months, with no Guild stamp, no Bindwright, no registration, no—"
She stopped.
Soren watched her arrive at the second half of it about four seconds after he had arrived at it in a dark counting house.
"If I take this to a magistrate," Vesper said slowly, "he starts by asking why forty unregistered slaves were moving through the town my carts go to twice a month."
"Yes, my lady."
"And then he audits me..."
"Most likely, my lady."
Sera came off the wall properly this time and crossed to the desk, and Vesper did something Soren had never seen in three years of inherited memory.
She turned the book around and pushed it toward her guard without being asked.
Sera read it standing up. It took her about twenty seconds.
"Sallow Hand," she said.
"You know them?"
"I know the shape of them. Every town has one." Sera tapped the column with two fingers.
"Vail isn't running this, my lady. Vail is being run. A grain factor doesn't move people. He hasn't got the men, the road, or the guts. Somebody is using his yard as a way station and paying him in protection, and the eleven percent is not Vail stealing from you, it's Vail collecting for somebody else."
"Then who?"
"A man called Brannick Sallow," Soren said.
Both of them looked at him.
"I heard the name in the tavern, my lady. He's supposed to be first level Adept from what I could gather."
Vesper's jaw tightened. She was second level Adept.
"First level," she said. "That's nothing."
"It's one level, my lady," Sera said. "And he'll have thirty men and you'll have me."
"I'll have you and that will be sufficient."
"It won't, my lady."
The room went absolutely still.
Soren looked at the floor and made himself into furniture as hard as he possibly could, because Sera Delacque had just contradicted her mistress out loud, in a room, in front of a slave.
There was no version of this that was not about to be extremely dangerous for somebody.
Vesper's head turned.
"What did you say?"
"I said it won't be sufficient, my lady." Sera's arms were folded and her voice had not changed at all.
"I am one woman with a mark on her wrist. If you go at the Sallow Hand and it goes badly, I cannot get you out of a town of four thousand people who all owe them something. I can kill eight. Perhaps tweleve. Then I am tired and they are not, and you are still there."
"You are bound to protect me."
"That is why I am telling you the truth instead of the pleasant thing."
Vesper stared at her.
Then she laughed again, and it came out ugly and slightly wild, and she flung herself back in her chair.
"Fine. Fine. Then we do it the boring way. I write to Vail. I tell him I have his book, I tell him the number, and I tell him he can settle it in coin over four months..."
Vesper paused, seemingly crunching details through her mind.
"...or I can put a copy of the back pages in front of the Bindwright Guild and let them ask him about his forty friends."
She waved a hand. "He'll pay. He'll pay because the moment the Guild is involved his protection stops protecting him and starts tidying up."
"Even those dipshit Sallow's would tuck tail and run," she snickered to no one in particular.
<<Lilith: That's actually clever.>>
I know. It's annoying.
<<Loraine: She is not stupid, Soren. She is spoiled, cruel, and eight levels above you, and none of those are the same thing as stupid. Be more careful>>
Vesper pulled a fresh sheet toward her, and then stopped, and looked up.
Soren was still standing there with his eyes at the correct height.
"You," she said.
"My lady."
"You are looking at the floor like a person who wants something."
"No, my lady."
"Don't lie to me, it's boring." She dipped her pen. "You found me four hundred and sixty one crowns and a rope round Vail's neck. I'm told that's supposed to be worth something."
Careful.
"Whatever my lady thinks is right."
"I think nothing at all about it." She was already writing back at her desk.
"Sera. He's made himself very usefull. Deal with it. I don't care what, don't tell me, and don't let it be anything that makes him useless for a fortnight."
Sera did not move for a second.
Then she said with a bow, "My lady," and turned, and looked at Soren, and jerked her chin at the door.