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Then the next morning there was the funeral at the Grand Temple for Balaban and Gülpasa. Kadou returned to his rooms immediately after the ceremony, and the one chess game Evemer dragged him into was disaster. Kadou was listless; Evemer, resentful—the funeral had reminded him anew of his anger. Careless-flighty-negligent, he told himself, and he and Kadou didn’t exchange a single word for the rest of the day.
And the morning afterthat,Melek reported that Kadou had risen at the crack of dawn and fussed with everything in his chambers, flitting from one thing to another without focus. That day, he refused to play at all, refused to let anyone brush his hair or change his clothes, refused to eat until Evemer was ready to pour broth down the prince’s wretched throat himself. Kadou was exhausted and wild-eyed by midafternoon, practically on the verge of tears with worry. In the evening, in a last-ditch fit of desperation, he dragged Evemer out of the palace, back to the bar by the docks where no one would look at him.
Evemer had reported the first incident of this sort to the commander, of course. It didn’t do any good. Kadou wasn’t forbidden from leaving the palace. He could wander where he pleased, including shadowy alleys and cheap dockside taverns if the whimsy took him, and Evemer could do nothing about it. Eozena, grim-faced, had told him as much, and then she’d solemnly examined the bruise on his face from where Kadou had punched him and told him to be very, very careful. As if he didn’t know.
He thought she must have spoken to Kadou about it privately, though, because at least Kadou had stopped cheating at cards and trying to pick fights with the drunkest brawler he could find. Additionally, as much as Evemer loathed admitting it, taking only a single kahya with him was the one thing Kadou was doing right. The one reasonable and insightful thing he’d done with any kind of consistency—two kahyalar would have been too conspicuous. It could have drawn attention, and therefore put Kadou in more danger.
There were two kinds of seedy taverns in the city—ones frequented by the dockworkers, the laborers, the smugglers and back-alley merchants, and the ones that were the territory of a more intellectual type, mostly failed poets and students on a rare visit home from the University of Thorikou in Oissos. The students didn’t have much spare cash, but they were willing to pay with drinks in exchange for academic assistance. Kadou, for his part, had already spent a lifetime supplied with the very best tutors anywhere around the Sea of Serpents. He and the students found mutually satisfactory business arrangements, and Kadou tutored them in logic, grammar, rhetoric, law, economics, diplomacy, history, and any of his five languages: Arasük, Oissika, Mangarha, Vintish, and Botchwu, the elegant pidgin of the N’gakan trade emissaries.
Evemer was not surewhyKadou did this when he was the prince of the richest country in the world and hardly needed pocket money to afford wine. He did not ask either, because when the nights wore on so late that Evemer’s eyes went gummy and he ached for sleep and the students began to trickle out of the bar into the night, then Kadou would turn his attention and his lectures to Evemer. On a rare occasion, he’d offer a chess game, but more often than not, he’d continue the topic he’d been in the middle of explaining or whatever else crossed his mind—usually money (which meant he was thinking of trade, which meant he was thinking about the Shipbuilder’s Guild), or the ethics of monarchy (which meant he was thinking of Zeliha), or both.
Evemer learned more about economics than he had ever thought he would care to. But listening to Kadou’s lectures, he had found that he was enraptured. This only added to his confusion. There was something about the prince that relaxed when he started talking about these things, explaining them from first principles and in smaller words than were strictly necessary. Even when he was alarmingly drunk, there was something of the radiant prince smiling down from horseback about him when he talked like this, and Evemer (to his deep and abiding shame and chagrin) found it difficult to look away.
“See, because—because it’s abouttrust,” Kadou said, slapping his hand on the table. “A coin is a promise, Evemer, it’s a bargain. I say: ‘I’ve made this thing which is going to be worth—’ What’s it worth, what are you selling me?”
Evemer’s body-father had been a horse-tamer, or so his mother had said. She was a weaver. “Horses and cloth,” he answered. He’d tried to cajole His Highness into talking about economics during the day, to see if it would cheer him up at all, make his eyes light up like they were now. It hadn’t worked; Kadou had been too distracted, all tangled up within himself. But this, now, was . . . strangely compelling.
“Horses and cloth. I say: ‘I’ve made this thing which is worth one horse or six bolts of cloth.’ I hand you—” Kadou picked up a coin and pushed it into Evemer’s hand. “I hand you a that. It’s worth a horse.”
Evemer looked down at his open palm. A copper kür. He gave Kadou a long look and waited for him to arrive at the point.
“So I’m—I’m making a promise, I’m saying that I give you that and you give me your horse, and you could use that coin to buy another, similar horse if you wanted.”
Evemerwasfamiliar with the monetary system. He’d only been a person in the world for, you know, his whole life. He’d only been on the royal payroll for nearly thirteen years. But he carefully did not laugh—if he laughed, then Kadou might stop, and go back to that intolerable wallowing. This was better to watch and to be near. Infinitely better.
“So an interesting thing happens,” Kadou said, sipping whatever the students had supplied him with, “when I start breaking promises.”
“Oh?”
“What if you find out that the coin I said was worth a horse isn’t worth a horse?” Kadou slammed his hand on the table again. “Ruin! Distrust! I come back to you and you don’t want my coin as much because you know. You know that I fussed with it. I only gave you a coin worth three-quarters of a horse, and you don’t sell quarterhorses.” Kadou giggled into his cup. It was a very, very poor joke, and Evemer wasn’t going to even smile at it. He wasn’t. “Even if I’m embarrassed to be caught out and I fix the coin, you still remember. You’re a little more careful, next time. You tell your friends. They’re a little more careful too. This is why fineness is so important.”
“Is it,” said Evemer.
“Fineness means how pure the metal is,” Kadou said. His eyes were watery and bloodshot and he swayed a little where he sat. Oddly, his voice didn’t slur very much at all. All those rhetoric and elocution lessons, Evemer supposed. “If I give you a coin that is perfectly pure gold, three nines fine—that’s nine hundred and ninety-nine parts to a thousand—we’ll say it’s worth a horse. Not how much a horse costs, but we’ll just say it is, because of the arithmetic. And if I give you a coin that has a fineness of seven-five-oh, that’s three-quarters of a horse. Again, just because of the arithmetic. Do you see yet?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, so you see—people like doing business with people they can trust. It’s good when everybody trusts you, isn’t it?” Kadou sat up very straight. “Like you! Eozena and my sister trust you, clearly. You couldn’t do your job without trust either. Coins are the same. You can’t cheat people too often, or they stop wanting to take your coins, and if they don’t want your coins then they aren’t coins anymore, they’re just bits of metal. Take Qeteren, for example.”
“Yes, sir.”
“They were fine, Qeteren were. Then, a long time ago, a few centuries ago—gods, when was that? During our Ahak dynasty, I think—they looked around and decided to join in the very fashionable pastime of building competitive civilizations and, you know, taking part in the world. Then, what, seventy years ago they get into those wars with Yamye and it all comes crashing down on them. Because wars cost money, Evemer, and you can’t make money out of thin air. It doesn’t grow on trees. Except in Genzhu, where it’s paper. That’s a whole different thing. Anyway, Qeteren says, ‘Oh, damn, we need cash.’ So they get a loan from the Pezians, but they’re losing the war and they can’t get any more loans, so they try some other tricks—war bonds and that, but they’re still hard up, so they say, ‘All right. We’lldebase the coins.’” Kadou whispered this last bit with a certain prim disgust. “So they did. You know debasing, Evemer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You take, say, a hundred coins, and you melt them down and put cheap stuff in to bulk it out, then you mint ’em new again, and then you have a hundred and twenty coins. Free money, right? So life is good. Until everybody finds out, and adjusts accordingly, and then you’re back where you started. So the Qeter did that over and over, do you see? Until a horse didn’t cost one gold coin, it cost ten thousand lead coins with a bit of gold leaf on one side. So they lost the war with Yamye, obviously, and lost a big portion of their northern marches, and now they’re all paupers.” He paused, looked soulfully into the depths of his cup, the dregs of wine. “It’s about trust. That’s why Arast has never, ever debased, not ever. Not once in a hundred and ninety-nine years of the Mahisti dynasty, nor ever during the Shahre dynasty, nor Ahak or Tari or Misba. Because everybody knows trust is really the only thing you have. Trust issacred. We’ll assassinate all the heirs of a dynasty every now and then and set up a new one, no problem, but we won’t touch the coin fineness regulations. Everybody would find out immediately anyway—how many touch-tasters are there? Roughly one in ten? Maybe one in a thousand who’s really gifted? Wouldn’t be a point to debasing, we’d just kick ourselves in the teeth. We’d sooner sell the palace or personally starve first. Because what do we have now? Insurance. People build fortunes—empires!—on the foundation of Arasti trustworthiness. That’s why the thing with what’s-her-name—the Oissika, Madam Azuta Melachrinos—that’s why it’s such a big deal. Counterfeits.”
See, there it was. Kadou would start talking about coins—coins! Commonplace, unromantic things!—and reveal a deep meaning in them, a current of importance and the moral code that went along with it, frame them as symbols of fidelity, and Evemer was just . . . enthralled. He wanted Kadou to keep talking, wanted to listen and look.
“You show someone an altin anywhere in the world—well, maybe notanywhere,but anywhere that matters. Anywhere from the Glass Sea to the Sea of Storms, let’s say—you show it anywhere there, and people take it, no questions asked. An Arasti coin is as good as gold because it literally is gold. Nine-eight-six fine. Just a touch of other stuff in there so the gold isn’t too soft.”
Evemer had never wished that he knew more about economics, of all things, but he did now, if only for the sake of asking intelligent questions that might get Kadou to keep talking.
Kadou yawned. “Getting late. Must finish my wine,” he mumbled into his cup. “You know what else, though? You know what else is interesting? When other people start breaking promises. There’s things you can do to them besides refusing to take their money. Especially when the money they’re offering is yours already.”
“Like what?”
“Trade sanctions.” Kadou peered at him. “I don’t expect you know trade sanctions.”
