Chapter 195: How to Save a City
"Say that again," she said.
"Save a city. This one. Before we ride out." He propped himself up on an elbow.
Qingyue pushed upright against the headboard, dragging the blanket with her, sleep giving way to the focus she saved for people trying to sell her something. "You. The man who spent last night informing me he was in this town for a bath and a trade deal."
"Both still true. I’m allowed to want more than two things at once."
"Explain. Slowly. I’ve had four hours of sleep and most of them were your fault."
So he explained the version he could give her, which was most of it. The market yesterday had been loud in the wrong way: half the stalls bare, grain priced like it was cut with gold, shopkeepers watching the road for wagons that never came. A city this size, on a river this fat, had no business rationing anything. Something was choking it, and wherever something choked a market, coin pooled behind the blockage for whoever came along to pull the plug.
Qingyue listened, filing it, turning it over, and when he finished she was quiet a breath.
"You don’t want to save this city," she said slowly. "You want to own the thing that’s strangling it and be thanked for the trouble."
"When you say it like that, it sounds ugly."
"It is ugly."
"It’s efficient. The city eats either way." He grinned. "I just eat better."
She studied him a moment longer, and something that fell short of disapproval pulled at the corner of her mouth. "You’re going to save this city like a wolf saves a henhouse."
"The hens are alive at the end of it. Fatter than when I found them, even. Nobody in that market is worse off tomorrow but the men who were starving it on purpose, and I’m going to struggle to lose sleep over those." He was already reaching for his clothes.
’Mira. Where’s the boy?’
[ Downstairs, ] she said at once, unreasonably awake for the hour. [ Corner table, third pot of tea, buried under paper he definitely borrowed without asking. Been waiting for you since before the sun came up. Told Old Fu he had things to show you. ] A beat, delighted. [ I did warn you. The kid doesn’t sleep. ]
’Thanks.’
They found Hao where Mira had left him: a corner table gone invisible under scavenged ledgers and a map of the city he’d inked himself on the back of a grain receipt, marking it up like a general the night before a battle. He looked worse than he had the evening before, hollow-eyed and stained to the wrist, and about ten times more pleased with himself.
"You’re up," he said, not lifting his head. "Good. Sit. I did your homework."
Xuan sat. Qingyue took the chair beside him with the wary curiosity of a woman meeting a small and very calculating animal for the first time.
"Talk," Xuan said.
Hao spun the map around with one finger. "Your city’s dying of three things at once, and the beautiful part is that everyone’s blaming the wrong one." He tapped the docks. "One. Real shortage. The caravans that used to feed this place have dried up, because nobody sane hauls grain across three provinces that might be at war by harvest. That’s genuine. That’s the war doing it, and no clever tongue talks it away."
His finger slid to the market quarter. "Two. Fake shortage, stacked right on top of the real one. Half the grain that is inside these walls never saw a stall. The big houses bought it early and they’re holding it in locked warehouses, waiting for the price to punch through the roof. They aren’t short. They’re hoarding, and they’re betting the war makes them kings." A thin, unlovely smile. "It’s making the poor chew their belts, but that’s hardly their concern."
"And the third?" Xuan said.
"Third, nobody’s steering." Hao flicked the receipt so the magistrate’s seal caught the light. "The magistrate’s an honest man drowning on dry ground. No coin, no soldiers to spare, a merchant guild that would sell him the chair out from under him, and a hundred thousand people one bad week from a riot. He knows exactly what’s killing his city. He can’t lift a finger to stop it." He looked up at last, something hungry in the set of his face. "Fix those three, in the right order, and this place is yours. Not taken. Handed to you. With thanks."
Xuan looked at the map, at three problems drawn in a starving boy’s careful hand, and felt the private, particular joy of a lock offering up its own key.
[ There it is. ] Mira sounded like she might weep with pride. [ That face. The ’someone just gift-wrapped a problem for me’ face. My favourite face. ]
She wasn’t wrong. Break the hoarders and buy their grain out from under them mid-panic, cheap, all of it, his. March his own wagons down the road behind Skyedge steel and reopen the artery no rival dared touch, and own the road while he was at it.
Then hand the drowning magistrate a rope with his name cut into every strand: contracts, supply, a permanent Skyedge office to run the whole machine once he’d gone. Three moves. At the end of them the city would be fed, the panic dead, the poor with bread in their hands, and every grain and every wagon and every warehouse would answer to a mountain a week to the north.
The city would call him a savior. The city would even be right, which was the part he liked best.
"You are enjoying this far too much," Qingyue said, reading it straight off him.
"I’m enjoying it exactly the correct amount."
The whole scheme hinged on the wagons, though, and wagons meant Skyedge. He couldn’t reopen a trade road with a firm handshake; he needed real grain, real steel walking beside it, and enough Frostmoon disciples in the escort that no bandit or twitchy little lordling fancied his odds.
Even pushing hard, that was days out. So the lasting cure would keep him here a while yet, which suited him fine, and the bleeding he’d stop today with the grain already locked up behind these walls.
He had Old Fu bring paper before the tea cooled and wrote to his father in a dozen blunt lines: a river city ripe for the plucking, a supply line worth more than the mines, send wagons packed with grain and salt and a fist of disciples to guard the road, and send them fast. He sealed it, paid a courier double to ruin a horse getting there, and watched the man tear out through the eastern gate.
"So." Hao rolled his stolen map back up and got to his feet, swaying only a little. "Where do we start?"
Xuan stood, and the grin he wore would have chilled the blood of anyone who’d ever sold grain by the sack. "We start with the men getting rich off empty stomachs." He flicked a coin onto the table for Old Fu and turned for the door. "Let’s go make some very wealthy people very unhappy."
Behind him, Hao scooped his papers into a landslide against his chest and hurried to catch up, drawing level with Qingyue. "Is he always like this?"
"He’s a peculiar one," she said, dry as ever, though not without warmth. "You’ll learn."