Lora of Two Worlds

Five days after Felix and Alvin left Lohenheim, the Lohenheim Vault opened its doors.

The manager they had engaged this time went by the name of Josiah Waite — Greene had dug him out of the hostel-depot the Great Mercy Abbey ran in Augustburg. An abbey’s house, the trade he had kept; but the keeping of it was exact to the last thread.

Hostel-depots studded all the ground about the Empire’s two capitals: lodging, warehousing, and a buying-counter’s convenience, all in one.

Plenty of men, right there under its roof, sold their goods over to the depot at an easy price — no fretting over buyers for them — and set off home with the silver strapped on their backs.

An abbey’s depot ran less hard on profit. They would even lend on a farm family’s word — not coin out of hand, but seed-grain out of the depot’s own stores, advanced to the farmer; and come harvest, one peck advanced meant two pecks repaid.

That was the squarely honest trade Josiah Waite had run — and run so well, on good faith and thin margins sold large, buying big when prices fell and selling timely when they rose, that he earned the Great Mercy Abbey a steady silver year on year.

Only, this year the King had issued his edict: the abbeys might keep hostel-depots no longer — and the Great Mercy Abbey’s was swallowed up by some great house.

The new master’s way of trade was not Waite’s way, and he began to feel the itch to go.

Which was Greene’s luck, meeting him out of the city on an errand. He heard the rest of it too: Waite was a descendant of old Philemon the merchant-sage of the first kingdoms; his forebears, flying from trouble, had changed the whole family’s surname to ”Waite” — a weight set upon the heart, so the family should always be weighing before it measured.

Greene thought it over: the Yorvik journey had shown him the young lady was built for great trade — a talent of this stripe she was sure to prize.

So he sent Waite along to the General’s mansion in Lohenheim — to give Greene’s name at the gate and ask for the Young Lady Odenheim.

Waite, finding it was a slip of a girl, had half a mind not to come at all; but Greene talked him round and round, and he decided he would go east and see the ground for himself.

What he had not looked for was this: he had come seeking the Young Lady Odenheim — and found her, and also the onetime Duke of Zahn, these days the Baron of Charnwood.

”If we put a treasury of thirty million florins in copper into your hands to run — what would you do with it?”

Lora harked back to the day she had applied for her sub-fund manager’s post: this had been the very first question the interviewer put to her.

Thirty million florins?

Josiah Waite’s scalp prickled. Was he sitting an examination for Chancellor of the Exchequer? That sum ran somewhere near the court’s whole treasury take for a year, didn’t it?

”The kingdom’s case differs year by year, and trade’s case with it. Beyond the plain virtues of the merchant, there is only this: run with the current of the times, and move as water moves.”

A sentence that said everything and nothing — and it fell exactly on Lora’s liking.

For now they had no staff, and she could not well come forward herself. With Waite’s old steady hand, a sum like that could be turned into cash flowing like running water — and that was the very guarantee of wealth that went on growing.

With the man in place, the Lohenheim Vault opened in Lohenheim without one sound.

And Josiah Waite took his second start of the day: this vault was no prince-and-general conjuring trick, silver out of thin air. There was real gold, real silver, lying in their strong-room.

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The Young Lady Odenheim had even fitted him out with a woman assistant, Lilac.

Waite’s first trade, on the young lady’s instructions, was a whole boatload of spices taken in at the Lohenheim docks — and the gold they paid privately for it drew the foreign merchants far better than copper ever could.

The next day, Lilac came to tell him: a boatload of the foreign merchants’ jewels, to be received at the docks.

Josiah Waite had the shape of it in short order:

The Empire was the gathering-ground of the foreign merchants. Goods came in too many; the court’s own buying of such luxuries ran thin; the competition was cutthroat. The merchants left over, their wares stranded in Goldhaven, sold them off to the private traders.

But the private traders held little enough gold and silver; and the merchants’ own kingdoms ran on gold and silver coin — copper carried home was so much dead weight.

The market was in a cash famine as it stood. There was no more money to pay out; only barter answered barter — and that multiplied the difficulty of a foreign merchant’s laying hands on the goods he actually needed.

The young lady’s edge was this: real gold, real silver.

They paid the merchants in gold and silver; the merchants carried it down to Southreach, where gold and silver passed freely, and bought their goods with it; and so, all unseen, the metal that could not stir one step in the Heartland came to move — carried on foreign backs.

Which left him the one task: move the foreign merchants’ goods out, and fast.

Thin margins sold large would move goods fast — and with gold and silver for their buying, the house’s power at the bargaining-table ran past anything Josiah Waite had imagined. Even at the low end, the earnings were no small thing.

Watching Waite move his pieces, Lora — sitting on the swing in the baronial residence’s back garden — turned her head and laughed to Leon:

”Cousin, you owe Greene an extra drumstick. The man he found — I like him!”

”A drumstick?”

”Er — a bonus, I mean. The man has a genuine head for trade. I left the whole scheme unsaid on purpose, and he read my meaning anyway.” The swing swung no great arc, and Lora’s two feet kicked with delight.

A good right hand in hand — and for the moment it let her forget the thin gray ache of it: her father and brothers left tomorrow.

Leon smiled and gave the swing another push from behind. ”The autumn hunting is at its best just now. When do you mean to set out?”

” Soon as may be. There are three months yet before the snows. Find the gold, get our preparations in before the passes close — and come the spring hunt, we break ground.”

Lora said it with all the confidence in the world. Leon raked his memory through and through — and came up with nothing: no memory in him of any gold mine about Lohenheim.

He reached out and stilled the swing, and asked, looking down:

”This... courtship of ours. Does it — suit you, do you think?”

Lora had near forgotten the hard riddle she had set this ancient man of hers. She smiled and nodded without thinking. Leon let out his breath, and went on:

”You said it once: two people in love each keep their own room — but they do not hide the truth from each other.”

”I did say that...”

A small unease stirred in Lora. Would he ask for another trade of secrets? She was willing enough to tell — what she feared was his failing to understand, and taking her for a monster.

”Did you know the Church’s old tales have their ’soul-seizing,’ and the adepts’ lore its ’form-shifting’ — and that the two names tell one tale? Much what we would call ’borrowing a corpse to bring back the soul.’”

Lora’s heart went pit-a-pat: did he suspect her already? She had crossed over into the Lora Odenheim of a thousand years and more back — what else was that but a borrowed corpse with the soul come home?

Leon went on: ”The old philosophers have a further notion, called ’the transmigration of souls.’ It differs a little from soul-seizing: it is one’s own awareness, moving on — and the memory carried forward with it. I hunted through book after book before I learned these things ran current as far back as the Greek sages.”

He took Lora’s hand, and the two of them walked slowly toward the cold-mist chamber.

”The day my brother the King stripped my title, my mind was suddenly holding memories that had never been there before... How I would die, four years on. What would befall the Odenheims in the meanwhile. I believe — that is what the transmigration of souls is.”

Leon closed the door, and drew Lora — her face all wonder and question — into his arms:

”Yvonne — does a thing like this frighten you? I have never said it to a living soul, your brothers not excepted. But I thought: you hold the Grand Strategy of the Realms, and it is written full of things past belief. Perhaps, for you, this might be... receivable.”

Lora tipped her face up — and saw a face gone a little frightened itself.

After all, there were no web novels yet in that age, no making every man jack know the words rebirth and transmigration. Poor honest soul — carrying it alone all this while, and hunting through all those books besides...

At the thought, Lora couldn’t hold the laugh in. She pinched his nose and gave it a wag:

”What’s frightening about that? Since the world began there has been no lack of folk who know before the event — and how lucky a thing that is!... Oh! That’s why you went along with my eldest brother to Yorvik — because you knew beforehand what would... And Lillian!”

Leon, in all his misgiving, had waited for just these words — and now the smile came out on him too. He caught Lora’s hand, carried it to his lips, and kissed it, with a sly glint:

”So — tell me: are you soul-seizing? Or transmigration of souls?”