Tides Collection

2. The Accounting Problem-1

It wasn’t Lees’s name that Ormo gave her then. It was more than a year before his name came up. In the meantime, things returned to business as usual for Syrina, with the addition of Triglav. Watch him, steal that, kill her. Working with the owl became as natural for her as it had being alone. He seemed to know her thoughts, and he always did what she wanted.

When Lees’s name came up, it came up like all the others had.

* * *

She met Ormo in his Hall. It was decorated like his private chambers, and for that matter, like most of Eheene. Walls built from obsidian and white marble blocks made a rectangular checkered pattern, otherwise unadorned. Naphtha braziers hissed bluish-white flames in the corners and left only the top of the dais in the center of the vast room in shadows. The onyx floor whispered and hummed when Syrina’s bare feet padded over it, but she’d long ago stopped being disconcerted by the sound. Triglav circled somewhere outside. He’d find her within a few minutes of coming out and either land on her shoulder or follow above, depending on his mood.

“There’s a delicate situation I’d like you to look into,” Ormo said.

He began a lot of the jobs he gave her that way.

“Of course there is,” she said. “As usual, I’d like nothing better.”

“I know.”

Once again, she could feel his smile through the paint and shadows, as sure as she could feel Triglav’s presence somewhere outside.

“As I said, it’s a delicate matter. Subtlety is of the essence.”

“Isn’t it always?”

He chuckled down at her. “There’s a merchant—a low merchant—named Xereks Lees. For the past several years there have been growing discrepancies between his reported profits and costs. They’re beginning to show troubling tendencies. I’d like you to investigate the matter.”

Syrina couldn’t hide her disappointment. “If it’s an accounting issue, Ma’is, do you need a Kalis to deal with it? Surely—”

“Mr. Lees is a powerful man. About as powerful as someone can be without being invited to join the High Merchant’s Syndicate. Powerful enough that perhaps one day he’ll be asked to replace one of the Fifteen. His power, no doubt, comes in part from the backing of one of my colleagues. It’s for this reason I have ignored his inconsistencies until now. However, they have begun to affect my own interests past the point where I can pretend they don’t exist. If I’m going to pursue any action against Mr. Lees, legal or otherwise, I need to know what’s happening so I can decide whether it’s worth the risk. If it is, I need proof I can bring to the other High Merchants. Enough that the one backing him will have no recourse against me.”

Syrina nodded and sighed. Paperwork. “Delicate. Fine. Where can I find this Xereks Lees?”

Paperwork“He manufactures a wide range of ceramic and metal machine parts for local interests—naphtha refineries and the like—and for steam machines in N’narad. His offices are adjacent to his warehouse near the commercial port in the Foreigner’s District. Exporter Row.”

“N’narad. So he has dealings with the Church?”

“I don’t have details, but as difficult as it is to trade with N’narad without getting involved with the Church, it is likely.”

“Okay, then. Delicate. I’ll see what I can find. Anything else I should know?”

“He gets most of his raw components from Naasha Skaald.”

“Who? The name sounds familiar.”

“The materials merchant—copper mostly—who’s been having trouble with Corsair raids on her coastal smelters.”

“Ah, right.”

“Lees’s costs have been going up parallel to Skaald’s security expenses, same as everyone else’s.”

“I see. All right. I think I can use that.”

“I have faith, Kalis. Let me know if there’s anything else you need. Until then.”

* * *

Syrina spent the rest of the day hashing out her plan and getting some old documents from Ormo’s archives that would be easy to alter. Then she stopped by the room that Ormo kept for her for a couple hours to put on the face and clothes of a young N’naradin merchant marine. She went with a male since women in N’narad who weren’t Church officials tended toward less martial occupations. She preferred the faces of the poor for generic poking-around jobs. Merchants and other affluent types never did their own work if they could hire a lackey to do it for them, and foreign peasants were common and ignored where she was headed. It wasn’t unusual for unscrupulous captains to abandon their hired help to the alleys of the Foreigner’s District if they were going back empty and didn’t need the extra hands. Contracts forged with fresh, illiterate sailors often included provisions about getting paid upon return to their home port. Abandoning rubes in distant lands was an easy loophole. The wait was months or even years to sign onto a ship going back to wherever they came from, and a lot of them wound up getting remedial work in the District in the meantime. A few might even apply for Skalkaad citizenship, and a small fraction of those might earn enough tin to get it and see the other side of the wall that separated the District from the rest of Eheene.

As she dressed, she prepared her mind, getting into character, and she thought about what Ormo had told her. If this Lees was dealing with the Church of N’narad, it could make things a lot more complicated.

* * *

It was well after dark when she reached the high, copper gates separating Eheene from the District. The wall was twenty hands of granite, topped with another twenty of vertical pine posts, polished on the city-side, which was unguarded. She had no problem scaling over it and slipping past the mercenaries that sat on the ground on the other side playing cards, even with her tattoos hidden under the false skin of a seventeen-year-old N’naradin boy. They were looking for people sneaking into the city, not out of it.

The contrast between the District and the rest of Eheene was stark. Wide cobbled streets and high marble houses were replaced with narrow, unpaved alleys and low wooden hovels. And there were no lacy bridges, no oily canals. The streets in the rest of the city were all but abandoned this late, but the District thrived at night. People staggered from the multitudes of bars and brothels, laughing, fighting, and shouting in a confluence of languages. Honest peddlers hawked on every corner, yodeling about everything from cups to locks to ceramic piping. Others whispered from the alleys, selling tiny leather pouches full of delezine and the glass pipes to smoke it in, or s*x, or slaves, or all three. Once, a few years back when she’d been there on another job, Syrina had been offered a wailing infant.

The bronze pipes that fed Eheene’s naphtha lamps were concealed by the elegant architecture on the citizen’s side of the wall. In the Foreigner’s District, aging copper tubes ran along rooftops from building to building, or led along the edges of the muddy streets, half-exposed and green with patina. In some sections, pipes had burst generations ago and never replaced. Now those streets were lit with torches, and candles flickered behind crooked shutters.

The District might be alive in the middle of the night, but Lees’s office wasn’t going to be, so she made her way to an inn she’d used before. An ancient, sprawling, dilapidated mess universally known, for some reason, as the Cranky Maiden, even though the sign over the brilliant orange door showed only a bed and a spilled pewter mug. It was less than a span from Exporter Row.

Syrina swaggered in looking drunk enough to not get noticed, but not so drunk that someone might try to rob her and put down two N’naradin tin Three-Sides from Ormo’s infinite coffers. Enough for a private room for a fortnight, plus another ten copper balls to be sure she got one where the locks worked.

The main floor of the Cranky Maiden was a high-ceilinged common room with a dozen long tables and a bar that ran the length of the back wall. Behind that, doors led to various private meeting rooms, the kitchens, and the cellar. Across the front of the room, filthy windows let in murky yellow light. Two unstable looking staircases led up to a mezzanine that ran above the bar. Smaller, more private tables ran along it, and two doors led back into the sleeping areas. The one on the right led to a series of dorms, each with a furnace in the center and twenty or so cots. The left one led to the private rooms, and that’s where Syrina stumbled. She found her door, made sure the locks really did work, and settled in.

The bed was small, but the linens were clean. Syrina was more comfortable sleeping on the floor, anyway. One of the walls was the chimney for the fireplace in the kitchen, so it was uncomfortably warm even with the window open, which in turn was small and dirty and looked out onto the wooden face of building opposite, so close she could almost touch it. She could climb out that way if she had to. Triglav found the window a few minutes after she settled in, and perched on the sill to watch her.

* * *

Syrina spent two nights and three days lurking around Lees’s warehouse, watching all the comings and goings, and followed some of the more interesting goings when it looked like they might be up to something interesting. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but she wasn’t one to jump into a situation without checking out all the players first if she had a choice about it.

She spent another two days in her room, doctoring the archived documents she’d gotten from Ormo’s library, changing what she could and faking the rest, along with the seal, until even the merchant whose name she was forging wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from one written by their own hand. As a rule, a Kalis needed to be more thorough than her target, and Lees would be as thorough as they came.

In the end, she was satisfied that she had all the information she was going to get without having a look inside Lees’s place. She took one more night to go back to the palace and confirm a few points with Ormo, then allowed herself a few hours of sleep at The Cranky Maiden.

As she drifted off, she felt Triglav find his spot on the windowsill.

* * *

Exporter Row was quiet in the early afternoon drizzle compared to the rest of the District. A few warehousing goons moved here and there, and once she needed to make way for a cart laden with bricks and long wooden dowels pulled by two shaggy black camels. But an hour after noon, most of the people were already in the work yards and warehouses, doing whatever it was they were paid to do. The air stank with tarfuel smoke from the N’naradin steamships anchored in the harbor, and her eyes burned.

Xereks Lees’s place was easy to find. Exporter Row was eighteen blocks long and two blocks wide, running along the northeast side of the commercial docks. His was the nicest building, if not the largest. Its wood was painted white. The high windows were cleaner than those of the Cranky Maiden’s, and LEES was painted in wide red letters across the side of the warehouse and above the door of the smaller adjacent office.