98 - Liquid assets

“Everything you own here?” Skorsas said. “Including even the clothes, if you were to”—he looked as if he’d eaten something that had made him sick—“sell them?” I signed chalk, which he had learned to understand; for all he would Arkanify me, I could Yeolify him a little. “Well, in”—and then he rattled off something in Arkan that I could not understand except that it had numbers in it, too many to follow.

He tried explaining, making a gesture that meant water, and another one that seemed to mean rock, though what this had to do with money I had no idea, and we both just got more exasperated, until we dragged each other to Iska. It was just before the morning meal.

“What he means is what in Enchian you’d call ‘liquid’ and ‘illiquid assets,’” Iska explained. “Half-liquid assets and interest accrued… you know what these words mean?”

Yes, I thought. They mean ‘Hand it off to Elokara.’ She was minister of the Exchequer, then. I felt a sudden pang of missing her. “Liquid means that with which you could buy anything today, meaning, money or a bank-note, if you had, ehh, never mind. Illiquid means that which you’d have to sell off first before you could use its value to buy something else—so, property, such as, in your case, your sword and those steel warrior-bracelets and all that silk-satin. Half-liquid would be things such as jewellery, which you’d need to sell, but can be sold quickly… Raikas?”

My mind had frozen in horror, with the thought that to get myself out of Arko I might have to sell Chirel. My heart screamed a thousand charcoals. Then it occurred to me that to get its true value I would have to say exactly which sword it was, and if anyone official caught wind of it, they’d know my name in the time it took a dose of truth-drug to take effect. No, there was no dilemma; my heart wanted to fall out of my chest in relief. “Sorry, Iska, I’m listening. Half-liquid, jewellery, right. Interest accrued… that means what a banking house pays you for putting your money in their keeping, right?”

“Right,” he said, with the thought clear on his face, ‘But you’re so civilized and intelligent, usually; how can you not know this?’ Then he looked at me under his brows. “Why are you asking Skorsas this?”

“Well, he keeps account, and I have a feeling it’s been adding up,” I said, careful to draw out the words a little so I didn’t say it too quickly, “so I was curious.” Good if I threw in a little barbarian bumpkin as well, I thought, since he was already thinking that way. “I never saw so much gold at home.” It was even true.

“Well, you’re a Mezem fighter,” he said. “If you blow it all on wine, women and song, no matter; there will still be a roof over your head and food on your plate until you win fifty fights, and if you end up having to fight naked because you’ve spent every last thread, you’ll just earn more fans.” I put a look on my face of being struck by the possibility, and went back to my room with Skorsas.

“Liquid, five gold, five silver, ten and eighty links, counting interest accrued,” he said. “Illiquid—not counting your sword, trust me, I know—forty-five gold or so; it’s amazing, what Minis spends, or gives, on a whim.” The building of the baths was well-along now, Iska and the architect now speaking. “Half-liquid…” Skorsas dropped his voice and mumbled, “seventy-eight.”

So, one-hundred and twenty-eight, roughly; Mana had been a little shy but otherwise right. We needed another four hundred and seventy-two… or more, since there was another person or two to pay, and I remembered people at home saying “It’s always good to have money when you are travelling.” And selling off the clothes Minis had bought me was certain to arouse suspicion, not to mention his displeasure. Mana could not have nearly as much as me, especially… I turned to Skorsas. “Why so much half-liquid, what is it?”

His porcelain face went a sudden pink. “Em… it’s jewellery… but… not that you wear. You know when Minis comes, how he worries at his clothing…” I remembered how his face had lit up, when he’d found Minis’ ruby button. I’d never found another speck of finery on the floor after that, come to think of it, though I’d seen Minis pick off plenty.

“He never did mention it, Raikas. But… I thought of what you’d said, so I asked him one of the other times he was visiting, ‘Remember, your incomparable self left a ruby here?’ He said, ‘I did? Eh, it’s nothing.’ So, em… I’ve been collecting them. I thought I’d have to spend them to dress you decently, but Minis gave me”—here was an Arkan word I didn’t understand—“for that, as you know.”

My boy had not only shopped for me, but for himself, saying a boy should match his fighter; that had been part of Minis’s gift, it seemed. The high-chainers’ boys did match, I’d noticed; I gathered, from looks of envy they gave Skorsas when they thought I wasn’t looking, that he now dressed more expensively than they.

“So I’ve got all that in a”—long aggregation of Arkan words which I gathered after much effort meant some sort of account in my name in a banking house in the City—“and…” He looked a little thunder-struck. “Raikas, you’re literate. You could sign for it yourself. Enchian is a civilized-enough language that they’ll deal in it; you should.” That day I did what I had never done in my life and thought I never would; signed to open a bank account. Under a false name.

†

“Well, how in kyash did you get so rich, so fast?” said Mana, in our oak-ringed glade in the woods. “Cheng, it’s all right, it’s all right, don’t look like I hit you, I’m just joking. I have next to nothing, in truth, except my sword, which I suspect I’m going to need in the future. A hundred and twenty-eight… It’s going to have to be what I’ve been thinking. I was turning it over in my head early this morning when I couldn’t sleep.” He took both my hands in his, and looked me in the eyes firmly and gently at once.

“I know, heart’s brother,” I said, bleakly. I’d been turning it over in my head, too, sick at heart as it made me. “I said we’d get it, and we will. We’ll have to resort to lying… to take out a loan we have no way of paying back any time soom. I’ll steel my heart. We can pay it back sometime… in the future… maybe Assembly would approve out of the treasury…”

He took a deep breath. Why do I see exasperation on his face? “Cheng... I know, I know. What would you know about taking out loans? They always want some kind of security—like a house or a farm you already own. Or else they want to know why, and if it’s some sort of venture—”

“We can make that up. I said I’d steel my heart to lie.”

“If it’s some sort of venture, I was about to say, you have to convince them you have an idea what you’re doing. Including when it comes to money.”

“Ah,” I said. “Which makes that out of the question for us.”

“Especially you… but me too, I’ve never been apprenticed in any concern or anything that would teach me enough about running one even to fake it.” What I had learned in my months away didn’t include even bookkeeping; no one had thought I’d ever need such knowledge. “Besides, we’re slaves, so we wouldn’t be able to go anywhere on business, we’re foreigners and so have no connections in this city for any business, and we’re ring-fighters so we could get killed any fourth day, and then their money is up in smoke. They know all that.”

I’d thought of the ring-fighter consideration, but felt we might be able to argue around it by adding a clause in case one or both of us were killed. With the rest, though, he had an insurmountable case.

“How about this?” I said. “We ask Suryar Yademkin for the money. He has a lot, maybe enough, with what I have. What is in it for him is that he never has to worry about fighting either of us.”

“If he tells on us, he doesn’t have to worry about fighting us, either.” He took up a blade of grass from a tuft on the forest floor and pulled at it with his fingers, as was his habit, when he was tense. He was also not looking at me and pulling the inside of one cheek between his teeth, as he did whenever he wanted to say, Chevenga, come back to the Earthsphere.

But I’d been here longer. “Look, Iska told me that, too, that they just kill you,” I said. “I don’t think that goes for every fighter, though, from a few things I’ve heard on the wind: just low-chainers with slim prospects. They aren’t going to easily kiss off anyone who is really valuable—meaning how much they’ll be able to charge for tickets to see you when you have thirty or forty chains. Both you and I are that; you might not know, knowing as little Arkan as you do, but we are, trust me on that.” He didn’t deny it; I wondered if Koree had told him he could make fifty, too.

“I don’t trust Suryar,” he said. “Or any of them. They may have been the most shrine-pristinely honest of dealers in their lives before they were dragged here, but being here makes every single cursed one of them our enemy, in his own eyes, never mind ours. You think Suryar is not above, say, blackmail? Or taking the money and then turning us in?”

I saw his point. It was one of those things that was risky in so many ways that could be seen that there were likely many more we weren’t seeing.

“Maybe Erilas can take three,” I said. “Surely Suryar would ally with us then…”

“Then there’s nothing in it for him, for paying for all three of us. He’d just as well pay Erilas to take just one, which is a third as risky, and leave us here. Chevenga…” He took my hands again, firmly, but made his voice very gentle, as if to a shying colt. “I know you don’t want to look the truth in the face, bitter as it is to you, and so that’s why you are thinking of everything imaginable but, no matter how stupid. But there’s no way around it.

“We have to rob someone.”

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