The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

conquest. This was the same, and it also wasn’t.
    She remembered being the only one among many who had feared the coming battle in Vanai. The others had seen it as an evil and an inconvenience and prepared themselves for Antean rule with an air of resignation and the sense that whether it was the prince in the city or the king in Camnipol, taxes would be taxes and beer would be beer and not much call to worry about it. Even Magister Imaniel had been more concerned with keeping the wealth of the bank away from the prince than with fleeing the city himself. He was dead now. They were all dead now, burned with their city.
    Suddapal, on the other hand, knew its danger. The fear bloomed in the market houses and the streets, on the piers and in the coffee houses. The whole city waited with bated breath for runners from Inentai with news of the siege, perched to fall on any scrap of information like carrion crows. Every rumor spread through its citizens, ripples in a pond. The debates in the taprooms changed from whether Sarakal would fall utterly to when, from why Antea wouldn’t march on Elassae to whether. The very rich who could afford it and the very poor who were no worse off anywhere left first, some by ship, others on foot. The governor and the council repaired to their estates, pretending to be in conference, though no one expected them to return. The stores of silver and gold, tobacco and spice, silk and gems and rare books filled the storerooms of the compound, and letters of credit left Isadau’s private study, written in cipher and sewn with knots as individual as a written chop.
    Cithrin watched it all with dread, but also a strange sense of relief. At least this time, she wasn’t the only one worried. At least Suddapal understood.
    The work of the bank also quietly shifted. Depositors came to withdraw their wealth, often arriving at the compound late in the evening rather than coming to the market houses. Even these were often taken as letters of credit rather than the actual coinage, but some coin did spill out. Isadau, on the other hand, began buying debts. If a taproom owed its brewers three months’ payments for their beer, Isadau paid the brewers half the full price today. If the taproom made its payments, the bank’s profit would be massive. If it burned, its owners and workers dead under Antean blades, the money would be lost utterly. Once, Cithrin had chafed under the timid strategies of her notary, Pyk Usterhall. Now she watched Magistra Isadau buy as much as she could of a city doomed to be conquered, and the risk of it took her breath away and left her giddy. It was optimism forged out of silver coins and paper contracts. A statement that Suddapal might change, but it would not be destroyed, that business done now, in the face of disaster, had meaning. It was banking as patriotism, and something more. Faith, perhaps.
    But along with it, Cithrin noticed new entries in the books. Payments and expenditures marked with Isadau’s personal chop. Money given quietly without expectation of return to men and women whose names were not recorded. Subsidies paid to the weak and vulnerable to help them escape before the storm. The beginnings of a network of ships, farms, businesses, warehouses that might also last beyond the arrival of the Antean army and give those many, many people who didn’t or couldn’t leave some hope of escape. The city, and with it the bank, had become a thing of hope and desperation and calculated risk.
    It was late at night, and Cithrin was in her room tracing through the connections that Magistra Isadau was building when the scratch came at her door. The sound was so soft, so tentative, that at first she thought she’d only imagined it. Turning the page of her ledger was louder. But it came again.
    “Come in?” she said, still half expecting no one to be there. But the latch lifted and the door swung open. Roach stood framed in the doorway, his leather cap in his hand. His scales—light brown when he’d first come to work for the bank, had darkened with age and the summer sun. He looked older and slimmer. He nodded.
    “Magistra,” he said. “I was wondering … That is, I was hoping for a moment of your time.”
    Cithrin closed the ledger’s cover, but kept her thumb between the gently pinching pages to mark her place. Roach stepped in and closed the door behind him. His nictitating membranes opened and shut rapidly as a bird’s wing and he held his hands at his