The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

camp at Kiaria, but in the morning I will begin on my way south to Suddapal and, my dear, to you.

Cithrin
    N either Komme Medean nor Pyk Usterhall made any mention of Isadau or of the steady stream of refugees that Cithrin helped flee from Suddapal. The only overt sign that anything about the operations of the bank had changed was the name to which the bank reports were addressed. Without any formal acknowledgment, they simply began to act as if Cithrin were the voice of the Medean bank in Suddapal, and so it became true. It was like a cunning man turning water to wine or a stone to an orange. She was transformed by the act of their collective will.
    Still, there were some details in the ciphered reports that carried more implications than others. Pyk Usterhall’s report listed a significant capital outlay for commiserative gifts, which technically meant additional payments from insurance policies that covered deaths but was also the common euphemism for bribes. Komme also recommended that all branches call in loans made to the Free Cities, Borja, and Northcoast, and that they avoid making any loans into those territories without extraordinary returns. Cithrin didn’t know whether the lives of people displaced by war fell under the heading of extraordinary returns, but thought they might.
    From a financial perspective, her own reports back were the collapse of an incompetent. The branch was losing money like a slaughterhouse pig bled. Ships hired for unspecified cargo. Caravan masters employed for half a dozen off-season trips into the Keshet. Cithrin gave out loans on almost any pretext with expectation of repayment to other branches and no way to track the borrower.
    Which is to say that the bank’s mechanism had reversed. What had been an engine designed for the accumulation of wealth had become a system for wealth’s application. She could imagine herself as some sort of half-divine fairy changing the world where she wished to by the careful dispensation of gold and silver, contracts and letters of credit. The difference she made was measured not in weights of precious metal, but in some number of lives and in children living outside of prisons. And she could go on with this until the coffers ran dry, and even past that, working on deficit until even the reputation of the Medean bank wasn’t enough to keep her boards from being broken.
    Some nights, she would stay up late and try to calculate her efficiency. How many hundred refugees had fled danger under her watch, and how much she had spent to do it. It occurred to her more than once that the Antean Empire had placed a low price on Timzinae lives, and that she had been the one in position to buy. Those were the best nights. The worst, she thought of other things.
    The logic of the world had been inverted. Cheap lives were good. Money was there to be lost. Even the opportunities that came to her were suspect.
    I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Cithrin said, shaking her head at the list of names on the page before her. “Look at these. Tamar Sol. She’s that old woman who lives beside the trading house, isn’t she?”
    “I believe so,” Yardem said.
    “What could she plausibly be doing for the bank? Darning our socks? And this one—Witan Adada? He’s the one with the missing leg who begs at that taproom.”
    Yardem sat on the divan, nodding, his ears canted forward and his hands clasped on his knees.
    “Many of them are vulnerable people,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re here for? To extend the protection we have to as many people as we can?”
    “Our privilege isn’t built on stone,” Cithrin said. “When we give this list to the protector, it will be a list of people immune to his authority. But it can turn into a list of people to be singled out for persecution without folding a corner. The bank is a protection as long as we’re in Geder’s good graces. I’d no more single Tamar Sol out to the protector than I’d point a wolf toward a baby. I won’t list anyone as working for me who isn’t willing to be killed because I did it.”
    Yardem grunted.
    “Not the best recruitment speech,” he said. “Let me take that back, and I’ll see what I can do about revising it.”
    “I’m sorry,” Cithrin said, holding out the page.
    “No reason to be,” the Tralgu said.
    The report had come in the day before. Cithrin’s scheme for an anonymous bounty board appeared to be moving forward. Komme Medean had included a list of