The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaigns (19 page)

A flurry of shouting and scattered cheers at the front of the crowd told them something was happening. Eventually a solitary figure emerged onto Farus V’s rostrum, dressed in a dark, sober coat and a respectable hat. Faro had done wonders with Danton—he’d trimmed the wild beard and slicked back his hair,
then taken him on a round of the Island’s best tailors and haberdashers until he looked every inch the reputable man of business. He was almost handsome, in a rough sort of way, as long as you didn’t spend a minute talking to him to discover he had the mind of a five-year-old.

“My friends,” he said, spreading his arms wide to encompass the crowd.

Even though she knew what was coming, Raesinia couldn’t help shivering as that voice rolled over her. It echoed across the square with effortless power, slicing through the buzz of a thousand conversations and silencing them midsentence. It rang with stentorian authority off the cobbles and made the shopwindows rattle in their frames. It wasn’t the voice of a rabble-rouser or the shrill screech of a fanatic, or even the rolling, practiced tone of a veteran preacher. It was the calm, knowledgeable voice of a man of the world, sharing a few facts of life with a beloved but impetuous companion. Raesinia half expected to feel an avuncular hand patting her firmly on the shoulder.

“My friends,” Danton repeated, as the murmur of the crowd died away. “Some of you know me. Some of you have no doubt heard my name in the paper. To those who are strangers, I will begin by saying that I am Danton Aurenne, and a little bit about why I have been compelled to speak.”

“Compelled” was a nice touch, Raesinia thought, as the speech rolled onward. She’d written it, apart from a few of the more technical flourishes, but seeing it in her own hand on an ink-splattered page and hearing it ring out across a mob of thousands in the middle of the Triumph were very different matters. Raesinia’s heart beat faster as Danton picked up the pace. He seemed to have an instinctive feel for the material—
God knows he doesn’t
understand
it
—and gradually let his slow, measured delivery take on more emotion and power as he went along.

Banking, he said, was an old and honorable tradition. There had been bankers in Vordan as long as there had
been
a Vordan, helping people through bad times with loans, providing safe haven for surpluses in good years, showing restraint and compassion to debtors whose luck had gone sour. Danton’s father—an imaginary figure, of course—had instructed him in that way of doing business, and when he’d come to manhood he’d fully intended to follow that ideal.

When Danton paused, the whole square was hushed, as though everyone present were holding their breath at once.

“But things are different now, aren’t they?” he said.

An incoherent mass of shouts and cheers answered him, until he cut it off
with a gesture. Then he explained just
how
things were different. The bankers had changed, and the banks had changed with them. They were foreigners now, outside the community of which they had once been pillars. Interested only in how much profit—how much of the sweat and toil of good, honest people—they could drain out of Vordan entirely. Parasites, sucking the lifeblood of a country like a gang of swamp-bound leeches. The bankers and the tax farmers—Raesinia was proud of how she’d slipped that conflation in—were to blame for all the ills of Vordan. If not for them, there would be work for everyone. Bread would be an eagle a loaf again.

“One eagle!” someone shouted, and it quickly became a chant. “One eagle and the Deputies-General! One eagle and the Deputies-General!”

“The Deputies-General,” Danton mused, as though it had just been suggested to him.

It would be the answer. Representatives of the people, working together in confraternity to solve the people’s problems, under the august blessing of the Crown. But it wouldn’t happen unless they
made
it happen.

“But,” Danton said, “we must hit them where it stings. ‘Burn down the banks,’ they tell me. ‘Burn down the Exchange.’ But what’s the use in that? The workers in the bank are Vordanai like you or me, and they’d be thrown out of work. The farmers who sell their food on the Exchange are Vordanai, like you or me. The Armsmen are Vordanai. Would you force them to arrest their own brothers? No. Our enemies are not
things
, not mere assemblies of iron and stone, vaults and marble floors. Our enemies are
ideas
.

“So, what can we do?”

He reached inside his coat and drew out a slip of paper. When he unfolded it, gilt lettering flashed in the sun.

“This is a bill on the Second Pennysworth Bank. It represents a promise to pay the bearer one hundred eagles. A promise—that’s all a bank really is, in the end. Promises.” He held the paper out at arm’s length, between two fingers, as though it were a stinking dead fish. “So we can do
this.
”

His other hand emerged from his coat pocket holding a match. He struck it on the stone of the column, and it flared brilliantly for a moment, provoking an intake of breath from the crowd. Danton held it to the corner of the bill, and it grudgingly took fire, curling up toward his fingers and gouting thick black smoke.

“This is what their promises are worth, when all is said and done,” Danton
said. As the flames licked toward his fingers, he let the bill fall, blazing as it drifted to the stone. “And we have to make them see it, too.”

He turned his back on the still-burning bill and walked off the rostrum. Faro would be waiting for him on the steps, ready to hustle him out of the square. In the meantime, the crowd waited in stunned silence for a few long moments, not quite realizing that the speech was over. Then, as if on cue, it erupted in a single voice, a throaty combination of a roar of triumph and a scream of rage.

At the center of the tight-packed mob were the vagrants from the Third. They’d waited patiently for Danton to appear, but now that he was done, they were eager to receive their promised reward. They began to shove their way through the crowd in a body, headed east, for the bridges that connected the Island with the Exchange. The rest of the crowd parted to let them pass, then filled in behind them, dragged onward by curiosity and the power of Danton’s voice. It was like a comet falling to earth, with the vagrants at the head and everyone else as the trailing, blazing tail, aimed directly at the Vordan headquarters of the Second Pennysworth Bank.

—

“My word,” Sarton said, looking down from the balcony. “There m . . . m . . . must be a thousand carriages down there.”

Faro, uncharacteristically, had thought ahead and reserved a balcony suite in the Grand, one of Vordan’s finest hotels. It overlooked the Exchange and happened to have an excellent view of the granite-and-marble facade of the Second Pennysworth Bank. So Raesinia, leaning on the balcony rail, had a box seat at the grand spectacle of one of mankind’s classic debacles: a run on the bank.

The Exchange was actually larger than Farus’ Triumph, but not nearly as impressive. It was simply a large, open, irregular space, dirt-floored and rutted with cart tracks. On a normal day it would have been scattered with clusters of men seated at tables or behind portable desks, with flags fluttering behind them on little poles like the pennantry of medieval jousters. Other men milled around them, running from one station to another, shouting incomprehensibly and receiving shouts or hand signals in return. Cora had explained it to Raesinia, once: each station was a gathering of those interested in buying or selling a particular thing or class of thing, with the seated men representing the large, established firms and the ones who shuttled back and forth their prospective
customers. Hundreds of millions of eagles changed hands here daily, in some ethereal way that involved nothing so concrete as a handshake. A shout, a thumbs-up, or a nod of the head was enough to start a chain reaction that, hundreds of miles away, might cause a ship to be loaded with goods and sent off around the world.

And Vordan was only a distant third among the great commercial cities, Cora said. The Bourse in Hamvelt was bigger, and the mighty Common Market of Viadre was large enough to swallow them both together with room to spare. Cora talked about the Common Market of Viadre in the same dreamy way that a priest might discuss the kingdom of heaven.

Today, though, all that had been roughly overturned, the tables knocked aside, the traders driven away by the mob. The banks ringed the periphery of the Exchange, their templelike construction seeking to impress a sense of their permanence and majesty by sheer force of architecture. The Second Pennysworth was one of the newest among these, a Borelgai transplant, and its building was the grandest of all. A queue—if something so disorderly could be dignified with the name—stretched from its doors and wound out into the Exchange, until it lost its identity and dissolved into a sea of pushing, shouting men.

Carriages were normally banned from the Exchange, but today none of the rules seemed to apply. They had begun to arrive not long after Danton’s speech, and as the hours passed the trickle had become a flood. Moreover, the vehicles that turned up had been getting grander and grander, sporting coats of arms and liveried footmen, until it seemed that half the nobility of Vordan was crammed into the market.

Somewhat at the head of the line were the vagrants Cora and Raesinia had handed out bills to the night before. They had served as the pebbles that, tossed onto a snowy slope, dislodge a growing, rolling avalanche of ice and dirt that flattens villages in the valley below. Raesinia watched with an odd mix of awe and terror as the thing she’d created roared onward, devouring everything in its path.

It was all about fear, Cora had explained. Banks were built on trust, and the antithesis of trust was fear. Even with the profits she’d made, they didn’t have enough capital to hurt a behemoth like the Second Pennysworth. But a little priming of the pump, combined with the magic of Danton’s voice, meant they didn’t have to.

Inside the bank, some poor manager was watching his worst nightmares come true. In theory, anyone who held one of those bills was entitled to turn up at the door, whenever they liked, and demand actual clinking metallic stuff
in exchange. The bank’s very existence was predicated on its ability to meet these promises. In practice, of course, only a few people would do this, but every banker lived in fear of the day that the people who had entrusted him with their money turned up en masse to demand it back. For the Second Pennysworth, that day was today. Every man in the queue had a bill he wanted paid
now
, for fear the bank would not be around tomorrow to pay it. Every bill had to be met with coin from the cashiers, with strained, frozen smiles. But there was not enough coin in the vaults for everyone, and the crowd knew it.

Shortly after opening, a Second Pennysworth official had come out to proclaim, nervously, that the bank was completely sound and no one had anything to worry about. He’d even tried a little joke, to the effect that if people wanted to set fire to bills of his bank, that was completely all right with him, since it would after all only make it sounder.

It hadn’t helped. Everyone knew that bank managers only said things like that when they were worried; when the banks actually
were
sound, they sat in their offices and met complaints with an angry, scornful silence. Everyone in the Triumph had heard Danton’s speech, then watched a squadron of determined-looking people march across to the Exchange and head straight for the Second Pennysworth to turn in their bills. That was enough for many, and the sight of the queue stretching out past the doors tipped the balance. The bank had become a sinking ship, and no one wanted to be the one left without a lifeboat.

“There’s a line at the Crown, look,” Cora said. “And another at Spence & Jackson. It’s spreading.”

“Of course,” Raesinia said. “If a respectable institution like the Second Pennysworth can go down just because someone gives a speech, then what other bank could be safe? Much better to cram your coin in a sock and hide it under your mattress.”

“I should have invested in socks,” Cora said. “Or mattresses.”

Raesinia patted her on the shoulder. “Sorry. This must be hard for you to watch.”

“Not . . . exactly.” Cora looked momentarily shifty. “It has its advantages.”

Raesinia quirked an interrogative eyebrow. Cora sighed.

“I was going to tell you,” she said. “But there wasn’t time.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing much. You know how I had to buy all those bills so we could give them away?”

Raesinia nodded.

“Well, I had to have
some
kind of a cover for why I wanted so much Second Pennysworth debt, or else people would have figured out something was up. So I arranged to
sell
Pennysworth bills at the same time, to make it look like we were just moving some investment around.”

“But if you sold the bills—”

“I
arranged
to sell them in the Viadre market. They’re not due for another three days. It takes time to ship the things to Borel, after all.”

“But you haven’t got the bills anymore. We gave them away.”

“Right.” Cora smiled. “Actually, when I saw the prices, I ended up selling a lot more than I ever bought.”

“So what you’re telling me,” Raesinia said, struggling to follow, “is that someone is going to be very angry with you when it turns out you’ve sold merchandise you can’t deliver?”

“Oh no!” Cora looked genuinely surprised at the idea. “No, you don’t understand. Once the bank collapses, the bills will be practically worthless. I’ll just buy the purchasers out of their contracts at a couple of pennies on the eagle. They might still be angry, but I think most of Viadre will be in a panic once the news of this gets there.”

“So . . . ,” Raesinia prompted.

“We get to keep the money from the sales,” Cora said, in a speaking-to-children voice. “But we don’t actually have to deliver anything.”

“So you’ve made money.”

Cora nodded.

“A
lot
of money?”

She nodded again, a little hesitantly. “I didn’t think I should do it without asking you first, but we didn’t have very long, and if I’d taken the time to track you down, the market would have closed . . .”