“It’s not like everyone will be cursing you for a fool, though,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard me. “Avaris, Vinte, Borgalos—they won’t mind. They’d shake your hand. Tripping up the Heyrlandtsche a little bit, that’s only to their benefit.” She shrugged. “So that’s my deal. I help calm the waters, and you give me the very, very long version of the story. Take it or leave it.”
So I took it.366
* * *
366. And then you cheated me anyway! Left me this mountainous heap of rambling babble, when you knew I wanted the story from you in your voice, not by your hand.
SIXTY-THREE
Mistress Chant and I had agreed to meet at Sterre’s offices this morning, but when we arrived, Andeer Janne, one of the clerks, told us she hadn’t come in yet, that she likely wouldn’t come in. We went first to her townhouse. She wasn’t there either, but her butler, Lijsbet, whom I had met several times before, was eventually persuaded to tell us that mevrol had headed to her country house before supper the previous night.
We were obliged to hire a pair of horses for the hour’s ride out, while I squirmed with embarrassment and tried not to look over at Mistress Chant too often to see whether she was annoyed with having to be involved in such a tedious production. We rode in silence. I noticed that she had a very good seat—she rode like a Qeter, in fact, and she has the look of that general region, though I might have guessed her for an Araşti or Kafian or Yama just as readily. I imagine it would be difficult not to become a good rider, if her homeland, growing up, had been Qeteren. The only people more devoted to their horses are the Umakh, far to the north.
We arrived somewhat before noon. I knocked at the front door, and we waited on the step for nearly ten minutes while Mistress Chant stood behind me and said nothing. “She has to be here,” I said. “Mevrouw Lijsbet said she would be.” I knocked again and got no answer, not even from a servant or the steward of the house. I tried the door—locked.
Mistress Chant snorted. “Are we going to break in?”
“I’m welcome here,” I said. “We’ll go around to the back. Perhaps she’s in the garden and didn’t hear us.”
“If she’s here, where are her servants?” But she followed me down the steps and the long, long path to the back of the house, where we did indeed find Sterre de Waeyer on the back porch, drunk and belligerent, even though the noon bell had not yet rung.
“No, not again,” Sterre said miserably as soon as she saw me. “I told you, I can’t.”
“You can.” I wrestled the bottle out of her hand and set it aside—it was empty, and there were two more, likewise empty, fallen to their sides next to her wicker chair. Mistress Chant made herself comfortable on one of the other chairs without waiting to be invited.
Sterre glared at her. “You’ve brought a guest,” she said.
“You remember my colleague,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about things again, and . . . she’s here to help. To be an outside perspective.”
“You told her?”
“He did,” Mistress Chant said. “But he’s told a lot of people.”
“He tell you what he wants me to do? He wants me to ruin myself. Give away my fortune, every penny of it, to—heal the wound, or balance the scales, or something. Some metaphor. Ropes, that was it. Ropes and boats and drowning. I can’t do it. No one would expect me to do it. It’s not my fault.”
“Of course it’s not,” Mistress Chant said immediately. Not the position I’d expected her to take, honestly, but I occupied myself with collecting the bottles and bringing them to the door inside, very slowly to give them time to talk. “Your job is much like mine—you go to strange places, and find wonderful treasures, and bring them back for others to marvel at. You make people’s lives better. And all this? Just an accident.”
“Exactly!”
“You knew that the disease would probably strike eventually, but you couldn’t have predicted that the city would flood like it did,” Mistress Chant continued in a soothing voice. “But consider ships—every ship is going to sink sooner or later. That’s no reason not to use them to get around, is it? And even if you buy a ship and it sinks on its maiden voyage, that’s not really your doing, even though you know ships sink from time to time.”
“Tell him that!” she said, pointing at me. “He just wants to make sad eyes at me and wobble his lip until I do something about it.”
“He’s like that. Ignore him. You know, there’s a quote by a famous philosopher—something about how a person can take no responsibility over anyone but herself. Heile van der Laere, I believe?”
“She’s a hack,” Sterre said immediately. “I don’t care what anyone says. Smug bitch. Holes all over her logic. Dreadful rhetoric, too.”
“You disagree with her positions?” Mistress Chant said, and I realized she was faking.
Sterre bristled. “As anyone paying attention would! Any halfway good idea she ever had was stolen wholesale from better brains than hers—de Coronado, aj-Karani, Valerius. Fuck, even Fortanier, and nobody bothers taking Fortanier seriously anymore.”
“So you think that a person does have a responsibility over others besides herself.” Mistress Chant nodded. “I respect your position. You’ve convinced me.”
“Have I?” Sterre said, squinting.
“Your arguments are simply unassailable.”
“Oh. Good. Yes. Philosophy was quite fashionable, ten years ago or so.”
“I see how much of it has stuck with you. Have you read The Chrestomathy of Righteousness?”
“No,” Sterre replied slowly.
“An anthology of passages from several philosophers who studied together at the University at Thorikou. A lot of it is useless drivel about turning up one’s nose at fashion and adopting strict asceticism, which I find tiresome but some people take to like gawky cygnets to water. But the core argument—and stay with me here—is that money doesn’t really matter.”
Sterre stiffened instantly. “I suppose you’ve never gone hungry, then, have you?”
“A few times. And you?”
“My parents were paupers. We would have starved without the bread lines and charitable strangers.”
“Mm,” said Mistress Chant, and sat back, folding her hands in her lap. She said nothing more, only gazed at Sterre for a long time while I lurked off to one side of the patio and tried to pretend like I was uninterested.
“All right!” Sterre burst out. “All right, fine. I was lucky that someone decided it was more important to keep me alive than to save a few duiten. But we’re not talking about a few duiten. We’re talking thousands and thousands and thousands of guilders.”
“How much is one human life worth?”
Sterre’s frustration collapsed instantly into misery. She looked around for the wine bottle and, finding none, slumped back in her seat. “It’s an unanswerable question,” she said.
“Mm,” said Mistress Chant again, and got to her feet. “Well, remember that unanswerable question when you start hearing about children orphaned because their parents died of jail fever or consumption in the debtors’ prison.” Sterre flinched hard at that. “Good day, mevrol.”
“Wait,” Sterre said, miserably. “Fine. You win. You goddamn win; are you happy? Fucking Chants.”
I slumped with relief. “You’re doing the right thing, Sterre,” I said, coming forward.
“What do I have to do?” she asked. “If any part of it requires me to sober up, then I’m out. I’ll tell you that now.”
“I need letters of introduction. I need bank drafts. I need . . .” I looked to Mistress Chant.
“A better story,” she said. “But she can’t help with that.”
Sterre grunted. “I’ll need to sober up to write the letters, I suppose,” she said. “Fucking Chants. I’ll send ’em along tonight. Dinnertime.”
“Thank you,” I said.
It wasn’t until we were on the road again, back to the city, that I glanced over at Mistress Chant
. “How’d you do that?”
“What, earlier? Persuading her?”
“Yes. You knew she hated van der Laere, somehow; you knew she’d react like that.”
“She was drunk,” Mistress Chant shrugged. “Made it easier. And at the salon, I was snooping through Heer van Vlymen’s library. He had a copy of de Coronado with a handwritten inscription from Sterre, exhorting him to read something of note and value rather than van der Laere’s drivel. Easy.”
I was quiet for several more miles. “You hurt her, talking about the orphans.”
“Yes,” Mistress Chant sighed, as if the whole conversation was tiresome. “Her parents died in debtors’ prison. Pneumonia. The wardens were still using duckings of cold water as corporal punishment in those days.”
“How did you find that out? She doesn’t talk that much about her parents, and I know you don’t know her personally, not well enough to have her confide anything in you. Gossip from other people, I guess?”
A mild, one-shouldered shrug. “You find someone and tell them a secret, and then they want to tell you a secret in return. There are many people in the city who know things about Mevrol de Waeyer, and I’d hardly consider the things I know about her to really be secrets. It’s basic Chant work, dear boy. But what next?”
“I’m going to go around to Sterre’s rich friends and show them the letter. I’ll offer to write them the bank draft there and then. I’ll see if any of them take me up on it.”
“Mm,” said Mistress Chant, and we said nothing more.
SIXTY-FOUR
I paid my first visit to Ambassador Kha’ud of Tash with my letter from Sterre, and when I came in, I sat. “I’m so sorry,” I said, never raising my eyes above the ambassador’s hands. “This is going to be difficult to hear. Sterre de Waeyer imported defective product into the country. The bulbs of stars-in-the-marsh were infected with a disease and would have spread it to the healthy ones through water contact. Considering the recent floods, Mevrol de Waeyer and I are assuming that every flower in the city has been infected by now.” I took a breath. “I’m so sorry, but your investment is about to vanish. It’s dying out in your gardens, and when it’s finished, you’ll have nothing left of what you paid for. But . . .” This was why I had gone to the Tashaz ambassador first. The Tashaz won’t interrupt unless it’s a matter of life and death. I wanted to practice my presentation of this issue, and I wanted them to understand the whole concept instead of getting it in pieces. “If you have any contracts with Mevrol de Waeyer, consider them broken. Whatever money you put down as a deposit will be refunded in full, without question. And,” I added, in a shaky voice. “If you have made agreements to sell original contracts of your own to anyone else based on next year’s prospective offshoots, Mevrol de Waeyer will fulfill your buyer’s financial obligation at one-third of the contracts’ face value. You won’t get back all the money you lost in this fiasco, but you’ll get some of it. Enough that you won’t be ruined. And neither you nor your buyers will be able to sue for breach of contract.” I folded my hands politely to show I was finished.
“Why does Mevrol de Waeyer care to refund so much money?”
“Because she feels that it was her responsibility. They were her choices. She’s a woman of honor, Ambassador, and she would rather die than have her name tracked through the mud while she denies and denies and denies that it had anything to do with her. She’s taking responsibility. Full responsibility,” I added. “As much as she can. She has a reputation to protect. Coin comes and goes, but a reputation sticks with you forever.”
“That’s all well and good,” said the ambassador. “But if I have purchased futures contracts from others? Private individuals?”
“We will also buy them at one-third of their value. Whatever you have that’s related to the stars-in-the-marsh. You can also feel free to keep the flowers in your garden—the disease won’t spread to other kinds of plants, and it’s already too late to save the ones you have.” I swallowed. “You might as well enjoy them while you have them.”
“I’m going to have to think about this,” they said. “Is there a time limit on this offer?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. Anytime you want to get out of the market, we’ll let you out. We made a mistake, and it’s our fault, and we want to do whatever we can to fix it. We want to erase it.”
“Not whatever you can,” they said sharply. “Or you’d pay the full value of the contracts.”
“If it is a contract you bought directly from Sterre, we’ll give you the full amount. But if you bought it from someone else at a markup, we can’t honor that. We just can’t. We’re giving everyone their money back, but we only have so much to give—we can’t make more money from nothing.”
They tapped their fingernails slowly on the desk. If I had been so impolite as to glance up at their face, I suspect their eyes would have been narrowed. “This all seems so convenient. Where’s the catch?”
That was as much as I’d expected. Of course they’d expect a catch—a catch was the only thing that would make this fit with the story in their head. “No catch,” I said, which only made them more suspicious. “You get money back, and you get to keep the flowers.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re sorry, and it’s our fault.”
“But nothing has happened.”
“It’s going to. The flowers are going to die.”
“Then I’ll sell them before they do.”
I put my head in my hands. “Just remember our offer, won’t you? Please?”
“Fine,” they said. “Was that all?”
“Yes. That was all.”
Mistress Chant had contented herself to wait out on the street—she didn’t care for the narrowness of the houses here, and she had mentioned she found it difficult to speak to the Tashaz, particularly dignitaries such as the ambassador, due to her annoyance with the eye contact thing.
“Well?” she said, raising an eyebrow and glancing me over. “I take it de Waeyer’s pockets haven’t yet been lightened.”
“I couldn’t get them to believe me,” I said.
“Do you believe you? That generally helps.”
“Of course I do.”
She paused, and nodded. “All right. Why don’t they believe you?”
“They thought there was a catch. Other people have too; the ambassador’s not the first. I thought Sterre’s letter would make a difference.” I eyed her. “Do you know the answer, and you’re just . . . I don’t know, being didactic?”
“I don’t know the answer, because I don’t yet know the whole story.” She sighed. “Let’s find something to eat and a place to sit down. No use loitering like beggars.”
She turned around without waiting for an answer and swept down the street. Here in the well-to-do quarter, the canals were wide and overhung with mature trees, which shaded the walks on either side and somehow muffled the noise of the city. Even in the depths of summer, it was cool and quiet.
Mistress Chant evidently knew exactly where she was going, for she led me to a small coffeehouse a few streets away and sat at one of the tiny empty tables outside. “What do you want to eat?”
“Oh, I’m not getting anything. I didn’t bring any money.”
“I brought plenty. What do you want? I’m buying.”
“You don’t have to. I’m not that hungry.”
“You’re—what, nineteen, twenty? Of course you’re hungry. And I’d rather not spend all day with this problem, so you’re going to eat and you’re going to get your brain working, and you’re going to fix your problem.” The attendant arrived at our table. “Coffee for him, please, cream and sugar. I’ll have—last time I was here you had a tea that tasted like a mouthful of campfire smoke.”
“Nuryeven caravan?”
“That’s the one. And we’ll have bread and cheese and whatever cured meats you have, and something sweet for the boy, too—cake or pastries or what-have-you.”
The attendant nodded, took
Mistress Chant’s payment, and left. “I really don’t need that much food.”
“I need you to have that much food. Coffee and sugar will make your brain work faster. I don’t have all day.” She folded her arms and looked at me. “I don’t know the answer. I don’t know the whole story yet. You, though. You are the only one who holds the whole story in your head. So you’re going to down enough coffee and pastries to kill an ox, and we’ll see if it jitters anything loose.”
And indeed, she made me drink two cups of strong coffee and eat three sticky buns before she would return to the topic.
“They won’t believe you. They think there’s a catch. Why?”
“Because they know Sterre. They know she’s cunning, and that she’s got a mind for strategy.” The coffee was actually making it harder for me to focus. “They think they’ve spotted something. Maybe some of them have gotten tricked before, or have heard of someone else getting tricked. They think Sterre is going to benefit somehow, and that if they can dodge her scheme, they can get some of the benefit for themselves. They still don’t think the flowers are dying—I spoke to someone a few days ago who was overjoyed to explain to me that I was all wrong about the sickness. He said it was a natural life cycle of the flowers, nothing to worry my pretty little head about. Not exactly in those words,” I added. “But that was the tone.”
Mistress Chant sipped her campfire-flavored tea and tapped the side of the glass with one finger. “Have another sticky bun,” she said, musing, and I sighed and obeyed—they were made of thousands of paper-thin layers of buttery dough, rolled into a spiral filled with warm spices and sugar and nuts, and baked with so much sugar and butter on the outside that the oven alchemized it into a thin shell of sticky-crunchy caramel.
“I can’t convince them to think I’m telling the truth,” I said. “They don’t even think the sickness is real, let alone Sterre’s offer.”
“For that, at least, you only have to wait,” she said, setting her cup down. “Your new story will only grow stronger with time.”
A Choir of Lies Page 37