The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

Was there nothing else?”
    No would be a lie. Marcus smiled and shrugged, his brain casting about wildly.
    “I can get you the note, if you’d like,” he said. And then, “You won’t find anything else in it.”
    “And yet when you heard us, you hid in a closet? Why was that?”
    “I’ve been in occupied cities before, and they can be intimidating. I got scared, and I didn’t think it through.”
    The priest cocked his head, nodded. “Thank you. It seems there’s no violation here.”
    “You shouldn’t be doing business with bugs,” one of the swordsmen said. “What kind of merchant works with these?”
    “Bankers can be surprisingly flexible where there’s money involved,” Marcus said. “But I’ll tell them what you said.”
    It was over, but there was still a chance it could go the other way. If the Anteans still thought of themselves as coming to enforce the curfew, they’d go now. If not, there was still plenty of chance for a bloodbath. But with him and the five Timzinae, the odds were good that at least one of the Anteans wouldn’t walk out. Apparently the swordsmen came to the same conclusion.
    “Next time, you open the door faster,” he said, pointing his blade at one of the Timzinae who hadn’t actually opened the door at all, “or there’ll be trouble. You understand me?”
    “I do,” the Timzinae man said, and the Anteans withdrew, scowling as they went.
    When the door was shut, Marcus sagged down onto a bench. The sense of narrowly avoiding death left him slightly nauseated. There was a time when things like that had felt exciting, but he’d been a younger man.
    “You all right?” the blademan said.
    “I am,” Marcus said. “Or anyway I will be. Listen, those priests? You can’t ever lie to them. Or listen to them if you can help it. They’ve got spiders in their blood that give them power over truth and lies.”
    The blade man’s nictitating membranes closed, and he nodded slowly.
    “All right,” he said. “You say so.”
    Marcus chuckled mirthlessly. “Well, I have a friend. If he told you, you’d think it was true.”
    This , Marcus thought, isn’t going to work .
    T hey’re good people,” Magistra Isadau said. “Reliable. They won’t say what they know.”
    “And in another situation, that would matter,” Marcus said. “But you built all this thinking you’d have to deal with swords and magistrates. Cunning men, maybe. Torturers. But this? These things change everything. The network you built didn’t take the spiders into account.”
    The Timzinae woman gazed out the window, her face hard as stone. The meeting room looked out over the street, the city. The wind was coming in from the north, pulling low clouds with it. It wouldn’t rain, or not much; the mountains north of Kiaria would have wrung the clouds dry. All of Suddapal’s rain came from the south. What these brought was the first bite of the coming winter. Marcus looked at Cithrin. She had the distant, calm look that came when she was thinking. That was good. One of the magistras of the Medean bank needed to be able to look at things coldly, and Isadau’s grief was going to make that hard.
    “What would you recommend?” Cithrin asked.
    “First off, tell everyone what we’re working against. The biggest advantage they have is that people don’t know what they are. But be quiet about it. It’s a hard thing to believe unless you’ve seen it, and if they start marching the priests through the streets with speaking trumpets talking about how they can’t tell when you’re lying, people will believe them and we’ll be right back where we are now.”
    Cithrin nodded. “And we can’t work together. Not safely. It has to be individual, uncoordinated efforts. We’ll need a way to support them without anybody knowing who’s giving the support or who’s receiving it.”
    “Don’t see how that’s practical,” Marcus said.
    “Really?” Cithrin said. She seemed genuinely surprised. “It isn’t difficult. We put a bounty on safe children. Anyone who brings a child from Elassae to Carse or Porte Oliva is paid out of a fund that’s administered by … oh, I don’t know. A mysterious figure in black, only of course it’s really the bank. Anyone who cares to add to the fund can send gold to some particular address and we won’t know who they are. Anyone who arrives with a child gets the payment without questions being asked. How they get there is their own problem. They solve it