The Price of a Rumor
It had been anything but an easy process. The smugglers were more tightly knit than I had expected, and they were first-rate at cutting loose their own tails.
But I had Loomdrax and Chyo on my side.
"Mind if I pull a con?"
That was what Loomdrax had asked me a few days back, itching to run a swindle, and I had cheerfully told him to go right ahead. I let him do as he pleased, on one condition—he had to fleece a target of my choosing as well. That target was the smuggling ring.
Armed with the intelligence Chyo had compiled on the organization, Loomdrax played the part of a foreign smuggling magnate and made contact with the very ring Rebert had once belonged to. Then, flush with my money, he bought up their contraband with gleeful abandon.
Reaching the ring's top brass took no time at all, and Chyo's map of the smuggling network was finished soon after. Chyo then turned anonymous whistleblower and tipped off the Constabulary, and the constables—grasping just how grave the matter was—moved with remarkable speed, sweeping up the smugglers from head to tail in a single net.
The children, used as the ring's courier mules, were handed over to the Constabulary in the process as well, but there is nothing in this world that money cannot settle.
Somewhere in all that, I acquired Phoenix Bank. The takeover cost me a tidy fortune, but thanks to it, every deposit sitting in Phoenix Bank might as well have been mine. I put those deposits first toward buying the children's freedom.
Which meant the whole of it had become my debt to bear. I had no intention of cornering Rebert with a long, itemized account, so I left the explanation out entirely.
"The details aren't for you to know."
"Then what must I do to repay this debt in full? Thank you—thank you, truly."
Rebert's face was streaked with tears. He looked half ready to drop to his knees before me. I had known he would be grateful, but I hadn't imagined a grown man would outright weep, and it rattled me more than I cared to admit.
Besides, this was nothing worth thanking me for. All I had done was right a wrong. Smuggling built on the backs of little children? That was the sort of thing no adult could witness and simply walk away from. Not that I could say so with any authority, being every bit as much a child myself at the moment.
"I didn't do it to be thanked. Just think of it as covering your medicine bill."
"You are an angel, my lady. Truly—you are the benefactor of my life, one I shall never see the likes of again……"
My face burned. Blatant praise and eyes brimming with reverence were a first for me, and I hadn't the faintest idea how to bear them. I also felt a twinge of guilt, knowing that the thing Rebert wanted most urgently would have to wait a while longer.
Founding the association was proving harder than I had imagined. I had meant to put Loomdrax at its head, but Loomdrax, it seemed, had no taste for art-world cons. Ever since the job on King Joseph, he claimed, that particular line of swindling was cursed for him—any con he ran now would surely come to light. Since I couldn't simply force the matter, the business of outreach and establishment for legal dissection had been shelved. Even so, I still had one card left to play.
"Rebert, the Painters' Association is holding a dissection this time. A month from now. Care to go see it?"
Rebert vanished from my sight—along with the sound of a body hitting the floor.
"Rebert!"
"Wh-what—what did I just hear?"
Legs gone out from under him, Rebert lifted his head with great difficulty, frozen in the pose of some tragic heroine.
"I asked whether you wanted to come watch the dissection."
Rebert raised both hands into the air. Then he began to move them as though something were floating right before his eyes, his gaze drifting off into the middle distance.
What on earth is he doing?
The longer I watched, the more my brow knotted. It looked, if anything, like he was rehearsing a dissection in midair. He had plunged headlong into a world entirely his own. The dazed stare, the unfocused pupils, the slightly parted lips mumbling away—if anyone caught sight of him, they would swear he'd lost his mind.
A genius physician, they said.
"Rebert. Rebert."
I called him any number of times, but he was already far gone; my voice never reached him at all.
Seriously, there was no reining him in. Clicking my tongue, I took my seat at the desk.
"What in the world is going on!"
Julia flung the report she had been reading across the room. Finance Minister Neruda stared, dumbstruck, at the papers scattered over the floor.
A murderous tension coiled through Julia's chambers. Neruda would have to conjure up a convincing explanation for accounting books that were slipshod beyond belief.
"You're telling me there isn't a single coin left in Cassion's budget?"
"It's not that it's gone, exactly…… it was placed on deposit with Phoenix Bank, you see……"
As Neruda mumbled and hedged, Julia's voice climbed higher.
"Then you go and retrieve it right now! What are you dithering about?"
"Phoenix Bank has passed into another's hands, and the funds have become unrecoverable."
"Have you lost your mind, Sir Neruda? When did those rumors about Phoenix Bank's troubles start making the rounds? And you still hadn't withdrawn a thing?"
"Phoenix Bank was wound up so very abruptly that……"
"And that is what you call an excuse?"
The veins stood out on Julia's neck. She shook all over, helpless before her own fury, looking for all the world as though she would topple over backward—and Anderson, unable to watch a moment longer, stepped up to her side.
"My Queen, compose yourself. Now is the hour to hold steady and plot the days ahead."
Anderson was right. Gritting her teeth, Julia dropped into her chair with a thud.
"Find somewhere we can raise money, Sir Neruda."
Having to hold out her hand to the nobles merely to top up Cassion's private purse galled her pride, but her channels of funding were sealed shut, and she had no real alternative.
And the day the gold mine's payment came due was still far off.
Julia had investments of her own, and money tucked away besides, but now was not the time to touch any of it. Until Dayson sat on the throne, there was no telling when, or for what reason, coin might be needed.
"I will look into it, but……"
Neruda's voice trailed off. Julia's eyes slanted upward into something sharp and cold.
"Why is your answer so unsatisfying?"
"A strange rumor is making the rounds among the nobility."
Trembling as he was, Neruda nonetheless answered precisely the question she had asked.
"What rumor?"
"Well…… it struck me as utter nonsense, so I told them to pay it no mind."
"Did I ask for your opinion? I asked what the rumor was."
The way Neruda kept circling the point was proof enough that the rumor boded nothing good. Still, she had to hear it. If it was false—or even if it was true—so long as it did not serve Dayson and herself, it had to be snuffed out before it spread.
"It concerns Prince Cassion, my lady. They say His Majesty holds Prince Cassion in very great favor……"
"Nonsense."
Her voice was calm this time, utterly unlike before—which made it all the more chilling. The air itself seemed to freeze.
"Yes, of course it's nonsense. I know that, of course."
Bending at the waist again and again, Neruda strained to curry her favor.
"Leave for now. You will raise that money if you have to empty your own coffers to do it. And this matter—"
Julia jabbed a finger toward Neruda's mouth. At the warning not to let his tongue run loose, Neruda sealed his lips tight and nodded hurriedly.
Then he bolted from the room like a chicken with its tail aflame.
"Anderson, how fare the people we planted on the Ehrenbergs?"
"No suspicious movements to report."
"The one who bought Phoenix Bank. Have you looked into that man?"
"They say he is a wealthy foreigner."
"Arrange a meeting with him. Immediately!"
That Phoenix Bank had slipped into another's hands was a bitter pill, but the money had not vanished—it had merely changed owners, and that was all. All she needed was to make that owner her own. Once the bank's master was hers, this whole affair would come undone with ease. To Julia, sweet-talking a single banker was scarcely work at all.
And yet, even though she had found a way to untangle the trouble caused by Cassion and Ehrenberg's unexpected appearance at Dayson's birthday breakfast, an unease lingered that she could not shake.
What am I overlooking?
Restless, Julia paced the length of her chamber.
Deep in the black of night, I still sat in my office, lost in thought.
"What are you up to, my dear disciple?"
Loomdrax pushed open the office door and sauntered in, and the smell of liquor flooded the room with him.
"Have you been drinking?"
"A little?"
Coming from a face flushed with drink, eyes screwed up and blinking, his answer carried not so much as an ant's eyelash of credibility.
"So which young lady of some noble house is it tonight?"
"I was on the verge of drinking with just such a young lady when my disciple called, so I came running at a single stride."
These days, Loomdrax lived as director of Phoenix Bank by daylight and built his renown as a Casanova by night.
"You didn't call me here just to nag, did you? Your master is a touch too busy to be lectured by his adorable disciple."
Disciple this, master that—when it came to such nonsense, the only thing good for one's peace of mind was to ignore it entirely.
"Have a seat for a moment."
He dragged over a chair that had been sitting any which way and settled himself in front of me. And in that instant, I turned the decision I had made over in my mind one last time.
I was going to touch the future.
Until now, I had done my best never to lay a finger on any future that had nothing to do with me. But thanks to Karman, I had learned that a passive stance would never win me the outcome I wanted. And so I had resolved to put everything I knew to bold use. What I meant to do tonight was the first step.
"I need a rumor spread."
"What kind?"
"That a great war will break out at sea."
"Eh? A war?"
Loomdrax straightened his slumped posture at once and leaned in close. Ugh, the liquor. I pinched my nose and pulled away—but for every inch I gained, Loomdrax closed the gap, eyes gleaming.
"A war, you say?"
There would be a war. But I couldn't tell him the truth of it. When a swindler like Loomdrax pricked up his ears, it meant only one thing: this was a scheme with a one-hundred-percent guaranteed return.
Good grief, what a pack of scoundrels.
Going into partnership with men who thought of war in nothing but coin made me feel like a proper villain myself, and the sensation was a strange one.
"That I couldn't say."
I shrugged. There would be a war—but I played the innocent.
"You know something, don't you? Tell me, and only me. What happened to being good to your old master, hmm? My lips are sealed. I'll be the only one who knows."
Loomdrax spouted, one after another, the very words that no careful, tight-lipped man on earth would ever say.
Trust me, won't you. My lips are sealed. I'll tell no one.
Any single one of those lines alone would have been grounds for suspicion—and he had delivered all three. How was I supposed to believe him now?
"Don't go digging for details. Just get the word out for me."
"And my fee?"
The moment it was clear I had no intention of volunteering one, Loomdrax held out a hand without a moment's ceremony. Thorough to the bone, as ever.
What a warm relationship we had—warmed entirely by money. Truly.
I opened the drawer, took out the money pouch I had set aside for him, and placed it on his open palm.
"This should do?"
"My, that's a handsome sum just to flap my lips once. Say—will you not go broke, throwing coin around like this?"
Loomdrax's worry was a needless one.
This business was about to draw in more money than everything I had ever spent, all put together.