When Lawrence put his hand to his chin and his head began to drift, Holo made a perturbed face and jabbed his arm. Lawrence cleared his throat as he returned to his senses, saying, “Well, it’s just that cheap,” to implausibly paper it over.
“You can buy low in this town and sell high in another. It’s very simple, isn’t it?”
“Aye. I understand how this could make you forget about me.”
“… B-but there’s an even simpler method. I think this would bring even more incredible profit.”
Holo shot him a suspicious look.
Lawrence had suffered numerous times when he had bit on money-making schemes.
He understood why Holo would be skeptical, but this was the very essence of easy profit.
“Just buy coins without purchasing goods at all.”
Holo shot him an even more suspicious look.
“Here, if you pay twenty-seven trenni silver pieces, they’ll give you one gold coin, yes? So, exchange silver for gold, take the river down past Lenos all the way to Kerube, and sell the gold pieces there for thirty-five silver coins or so. Having exchanged for silver, you return here, exchange it for gold again.
“Even though you started with twenty-seven silver coins, each return trip nets you one gold coin and eight silver coins. All you need to do is repeat it over and over.”
Holo trained her intelligent amber pupils upon Lawrence, staring.
And after closing her eyes for what seemed to Lawrence to be a bit of a long time, she turned her chin the other way, her suspicious gaze alone turned toward him.
“If that was true, would not everyone be doing it?”
Lawrence nodded. He replied immediately: “They probably are.”
Holo raised one eyebrow. Rolling her eyes like that, she began: “Assuming my thinking is correct… if everyone was doing that, this town would run out of gold coins and silver coins would increase, yes? So would not the price of gold coins rise and the price of silver coins fall? Should the prices here not fall in line with those of other towns sooner or later?”
Having granted her the premise, Holo the Wisewolf could see for herself where it led.
“That’s correct. That’s why I’m nervous.”
“Whether to climb aboard while the situation lasts?”
Lawrence hesitated as to whether to nod or not, finally nodding.
Holo’s exasperated face might well have been a natural reaction to seeing the color of Lawrence’s eyes change when time was short for a chance to make money.
However, there probably existed a nearly three-tenths difference in the price of trenni silver pieces between Lesko and Kerube. If one could make such profit from transporting coins alone, they would be a very wealthy man in no time.
Besides, it was a matter that greatly affected the issue of setting up a store or not. If the difference at the coin market were to vanish, a store one should be able to buy for twelve hundred trenni silver pieces might shoot up in price to over fifteen hundred. For in this world, the bigger something was, the closer its price was based on the price of gold.
That three hundred silver coin surplus was the difference as to whether Lawrence could do business afterward or not.
“Well, such hardiness in you, I mind not.”
“It’s enough to make me want to run south with a bagful of silver coins right this moment.”
Holo made a tepid laugh at Lawrence’s words. However, the sigh that followed made Lawrence realize he had gotten carried away, snapping him back to his senses.
What came first, after all, was discovering the Debau Company’s scheme, not to speak of making money.
As Lawrence cleared his throat to return the discussion to the Debau Company, Holo seemed not to notice Lawrence, staring off into the distance as she murmured.
“So, is there not something strange somewhere here?”
Holo was a complete outsider when it came to trading. Having said that, she was a sharper thinker than Lawrence, and he knew very well that an outside perspective was sometimes the best.
“Aye… it does feel like a strange story.”
“Strange? In what way?”
“Mm… well… it’s strange, but… how to put this…” Holo bit her bottom lip and groaned.
Perhaps because, viewed from nearby, she looked like she was in a bad mood, the people around them averted their gazes.
No one in these parts knew Lawrence’s face, but they would likely remember the face of one with someone who stood out like Holo.
Just as he moved to whisper in Holo’s ear that they should leave the marketplace…
“I have it!”
Holo spoke like a hen that had just laid an egg.
Lawrence hurriedly covered Holo’s mouth and led her away.
“Give me a break.”
The center of the marketplace was more of a square than a street.
There were no stalls. Chairs that were just cut logs were placed so that passersby could take a break, with conversation blooming among many people.
Lawrence led Holo by the hand, seating both of them on log chairs as casually as he could manage.
When Lawrence asked, “And?” Holo used her usual “Heh-heh” with her nose held high.
“For a merchant like you not to notice…”
“… Well, pardon me.”
“Well, of course, something of this level is obvious to me; I am Holo the Wisewolf, after all.”
She was very confident, but in spite of calling it obvious, it had piqued her interest.
So there was some sort of trick at work?
As Lawrence drew his face closer, Holo spoke with a smile all over her face.
“If that story is true, why doesn’t the Whatever Company do it?”
“… Eh?”
“According to that rather spirited old money changer, that company digs up and sells many things, and because it receives gold coins in return, gold coins are cheap here, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Then given that, ’tis a simple problem. Why does it not do so itself? ’Tis not strange?”
Lawrence started to say, “But that’s…” but the words died on his lips.
“That company receives gold coins. So why does it not bring the entirety of those gold coins to another town? If it did so, it could exchange the whole lot for silver coins, could it not? Why does it not, then? ’Twould be the most profitable method.”
Now that she mentioned it, it was.
But he felt like that reasoning had its own flaws.
What was strange about it? Certainly, the market price of trenni silver pieces was unusual, but there were often unusual things about market prices.
But this strangeness was not of that kind whatsoever.
This was something beyond his comprehension.
“No, there’s something odd about that.”
“Where is it odd?”
“No, it’s really odd. What can this mean?”
As he scratched his head, he went over the facts once more.
This town had lumione gold pieces. This was gold the Debau Company had reaped in profit.
And since it was difficult to make small purchases with gold coins, naturally one exchanged them into other smaller currencies, silver and copper coins and the like. However, in doing so, the price would rise. It would inevitably rise. That was why a market price of one gold coin to twenty-seven silver coins was beyond belief.
That was fine.
Next was the idea of how to profit from the coin prices. That is, if one obtained gold coins here, changed them to silver coins in another town, and brought the silver coins back to change them into gold once more, one would profit.
That, too, was fine. Naturally, all traveling merchants would do so given the opportunity.
That brought the next problem.
That being the case, why did the Debau Company not do so by itself? If it brought all its gold coins and converted them to silver, it would make money hand over fist.
Yes. That meant since all of the gold coins in circulation in this town had been earned by the Debau Company, it was using the coin prices to profit; in other words, from receiving the commission from the silver coins people like Lawrence brought into the town.
So why did the Debau Company not do it itself?
Holo was right to point that out.
One gold coin to twenty-seven silver coins was close to eight silver coins’ difference from other towns’ market prices.
Put another way, they gave you a reward of eight silver coins for going through the time and trouble of going to another city to convert one’s gold coins into silver.
That was strange.
It was very strange.
“They must have kind of a goal.”
But what in the world might that be? He felt that even if they were waging war, it was still no reason to go through all this. Perhaps it was a scheme to take advantage of reminting or something similar, like when Lawrence had met Holo?
But if that was the case, it was too unnatural to happen in this town. If there was talk of reminting trenni silver pieces, lands far to the south would have long been in uproar.
Yet this town was peaceful and full of liveliness.
Furthermore, even with the unusual market price, everyone was calmly conducting business.
If the Debau Company’s own exchange was converting one gold coin to twenty-seven silver coins without fail, there certainly was not any reason to rush over and exchange. Gold coins were too inconvenient for use in day-to-day life. It was more sensible to trade more, gather coins together, and then go exchange it.
Besides, even if one could profit from the coin prices of other towns in theory, the only ones who could do that in practice were nimble traveling merchants and large companies doing business in multiple towns. No doubt craftsmen would not even notice, and city merchants could hardly abandon their shops. In the first place, farmers with no way to know the market prices of different towns surely would not be thinking beyond Goodness, they sure sell a lot of things here.
What Lawrence still could not understand was he did not think the Debau Company could deliberately maintain these market prices except at substantial cost to itself.
As for why it would do such a thing, nothing made sense.
Come to think of it, the Debau Company was paying for the lodging expenses of mercenaries, the Myuri Mercenary Company included. The rumor was it was paying out twenty lumione gold pieces a day; at any rate, a large amount of money. What was behind such a lavish display? Was there a goal? Or were they simply making too much money?
They had discovered many strange things about the Debau Company, but this thing was truly a strange story.
What was the meaning of maintaining the market price at the cost of its own profits?
Lawrence put the question to Holo. “What do you think?” Then having so asked, something occurred to him. “Ah.”
“You may well ask me, but…”
Alone and lost in his own thoughts, he did not have any kind of opinion.
As Lawrence looked up, thinking as much, Holo made an amused laugh, shaking her head and looking truly happy.
“It seems that little by little, I’ve gained a place in your mind.”
For an instant, Lawrence did not understand the meaning of her words, but he realized it a few moments later.
What did he think?
Until now, he had been spending time in his own little world, unable to see anything around him as he thought.
“Aye. And, just to mention, you really should be more aware of how much you speak to yourself.”
“Wha–?”
He hurriedly closed his mouth and looked all around, but of course, words could not be pulled back once spoken.
Holo guffawed at the silliness of it, laughing as she said, “I jest.
“Aye. I understand not the fine details but, at the very least, based on what I have observed, there is some structure at work, and its shape is a warped one. There is reason in this world, reason as unchanged by the centuries as I.”
Holo’s fearless smile was truly a thing of beauty. Bewitching, one might say.
Her fangs peeked just out under her lip, her eyes so fine that they cut into one like a sharp knife.
There were too many surprising things about the town of Lesko, or rather the movements of the Debau Company.
And at the very least, one of them was a bit too warped.
“So that company is indeed suspicious, ’tis it not?”
Lawrence looked about the town as he remained seated on the short-cut log.
A rural town full of liveliness.
A town like paradise itself for merchants and craftsmen.
But according to scripture, it was more difficult for people like Lawrence to go to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
“When a magician has a chicken lay a blue egg, and it’s not a blue chicken, you know there has to be some trick.”
“All the more when ’tis a goose laying a golden egg.”
Even if a traveling merchant like Lawrence could do nothing about war and the like, anything related to trading was a different matter. Also, the more warped a construct was, the more it could be brought down by even a single ant-sized hole bored into it.
The uproar just after he had met Holo was near enough to that, though that had gone somewhat poorly and was a dangerous situation for both of them.
“Hmm, ’tis like that.”
“Mm?”
As Lawrence was thinking of such things, Holo put her hands on her knees and rose up as she spoke.
“’Tis been a while since I remembered how we met.”
Lawrence made a pleasant laugh as he watched Holo, reaching out to her with his hand largely without thinking.
Holo inclined her head as she took his hand.
It was exceedingly difficult to resist pulling her to him and hugging her then and there.
In attempting to unravel the Debau Company’s plot they had found several oddities, but it was possible that these gave rise to yet other oddities. So they went to the marketplace once again.
If one traded long-distance between hostile nations, payment was usually measured based on lumione gold pieces. As coin market prices could vary between towns, one did so to make the calculations as uncomplicated as possible.
Therefore, if lumione gold pieces were cheap in this town, they had to think the calculations in lumione gold pieces were natural and reasonable where the town’s merchandise was purchased, such as Kerube and towns farther south. If that was the case, the amount of money used for the purchases would be relatively cheap.
However, when they gathered stories from around the marketplace, the reality was quite the opposite, even right there.
“The folks that come here? Of course, they come from all over; we’re a mining town, after all. Some folks hate to come, but they even come from the Dran Steppe up north and the Wessel region out east.
“Even if they trade locally, they’ll never get anywhere. Here, they can sell everything they can haul, even if they’ve got to cross dangerous mountain trails to do it.”
A general goods store owner with miscellaneous merchandise lined up on his shelves told them they rarely saw anyone from south of Lenos.
Whether handling dried fruit, sour-pickled vegetables, chicken, rabbit meat, fox and wolf pelts, or scrap iron, whether bringing them to sell or setting up their own stores in the unregulated marketplace, most came from places that could be lumped into the northlands. The general goods merchant himself apparently came from a cold village deep in the mountains.
They held no prejudices toward currencies that came to the town of Lesko via the south; to them, how easily a coin could be used held much more importance than which king had issued it.
Therefore, much of the merchandise that flowed into Lesko dribbled out of the northlands.
“Mmm…”
Having inquired a
ll around, with the day beginning to wane, Lawrence sat on the short-cut log once again, making a sound from inside his throat.
Most foreign trade in Lesko came from the middle of the northlands, with barely any coming via the south except through the Debau Company. What came in from the south were mostly cereals such as wheat, with nearly everything else provided from here and there in the northlands. Most of the daily necessities and even luxuries used in town were largely made by the hands of local craftsmen.
Also, no one believed that war was going to break out.
The structure of trade was largely the same everywhere in the town.
As the coin price favored buyers of merchandise, merchandise flew from the shelves. The coin price favoring buyers should have meant sellers were at a disadvantage, but in the first place, much merchandise was carried in from remote places in the northlands starved of people to sell to. As products of high quality were made by craftsmen high in skill and morale, reaching the continent by ship from the south, everyone bought them, and the craftsmen in turn bought even more materials. Everything was going swimmingly.
As Moizi had said, freedom was the force that made the town run smoothly, to an extent that was almost eerie.
In the town’s many circumstances, Lawrence might not have seen anything resembling a turbulent scheme by the Debau Company, but a number of oddities and the appearance of things going eerily well added up to the existence of something in his mind.
After all, mercenaries were gathering even though no one at all thought war was breaking out. He had never encountered circumstances that made no sense whatsoever like these.
“Perhaps we should return to the inn for now.”
When Lawrence raised his face to Holo’s words, she was rubbing a calf while sitting on a short-cut log.
When he saw that the hem of her robe had become filthy with dust at some point, he realized he had brought her quite a ways around.
“Ah, I suppose so… pacing back and forth while worrying really would be like a dog.”
He had been trained to gather information with his feet and think on his feet, but unfortunately he was not alone at the moment.
“Aye. I am Holo the Wisewolf after all. Careful thinking suits me far better than does walking.”
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