“A tour guide?” said Root. She couldn’t suppress her laughter.
The king held her gaze, unfazed as a brick wall. He was most of the way there. “Yes,” he said from his spot at the head of the table. “A tour guide.”
“I think what she means,” said Azriah, “is that a tour guide isn’t exactly the sort of specialist that seems key to a heist. We’re meant to, you know, sneak around, right?”
“And is that really the best practice?”
“It’s how we got you out of prison,” said Vit.
“And if you’d gotten caught?”
They shrugged.
“If you’re with a tour guide, you can go anywhere. No one questions a tour. It’s the tour guide’s job to walk all around a building—and make frequent stops, pausing here and there, talking outside doors. No? If you’re part of a tour, you don’t have to sneak—you can just go.”
“That…” started Azriah. He pinched his stubble. “That’s actually a really good point…”
“Of course it is,” said the king. “That’s why it’s part of the plan.”
“All right, so we need a tour guide.”
“We may have someone in mind, actually,” said Root.
“Good. The best, remember.”
“She has some added expertise that may come in handy.”
“What else?” asked Azriah.
“One other for starters,” said the king. “We will likely need more—I have a list, yes—but we’ll get inside first and see what’s what. What those bastards have done with the place. Yes, and if we recruit a tour guide, we should be able to do a little extra snooping about without suspicion, I should hope.”
“We’ll go recruit the two and schedule a tour as early as we can, then.”
“Excellent. As for the second recruit… no matter what other specialists we might need, the problem remains that they will need payment. So in addition to the halo, we need to steal a large sum of money from the Children. A lot. Seven hundred helixes apiece should do it—or more, depending. A second heist—two, concurrently.”
“So we’re targeting money vaults or something,” said Root. “I assume they have huge stores of gold down beneath the palace.”
“We need someone to get inside,” said Vit, nodding.
“A locksmith,” said Azriah, spreading his hands as if to indicate his earlier point.
The king tutted. “Living in the past—living in the past. Vaults? Really? You want to haul huge heaps of gold out of there—hundreds, thousands of pounds? How fast can you run so encumbered? How many trips do you think you can take before someone catches on?”
Root threw up a hand. “All right, what, then? Did you leave a collection of miniature, super-valuable paintings around when you left?”
The king rolled his little carved eyes. “There’s a much easier way to steal a large sum of money that doesn’t require lifting enormous mounds of gold. That’s where our second recruit comes in.”
Saly Cranitch scanned the ledger on the desk before him, revising his work. The math ticked through his mind, numbers flying by like a flip book as they added, subtracted—living, breathing things, moving in time, a story told line by line. He licked a finger, adjusted his glasses, and flipped the page. Oh, shoot—spit on his glasses. Where was that cloth…
Glasses once again smudge-free, he excitedly returned his attention to the ledger. It was just getting to the good part!
“Uhp,” he muttered. An error. He reached for a pencil, shaking his head. But this is why we check our work, he thought to himself. Can’t write a book in one draft, can’t paint a masterpiece without stepping back to assess.
Saly erased the errant number, brushed off the paper, made the adjustment. Much better. He continued to polish up the space around the correction as his eyes skimmed the remainder of the page. He hated the messy look of something changed or a number improperly formed. There was such a beauty in a perfect page—a nice, neat, orderly page.
He drummed a finger on his desk, tapping along with the lines. If he was being quite honest—and it was a little embarrassing—he’d invented a sort of song that accompanied the revising of a ledger, a pattern of notes that corresponded to an addition of tens, hundreds, thousands, their inverses in subtraction, a sweet resolution to match the exhale of a new sum and the beginning of a new section. And every ledger was different.
Between pages, he lifted his eyes—first to check the time, then to the portrait at the corner of his desk. Yes, all right—it was about that time. He had a family to get home to after such a long day, the Mrs. and the boys—and a few errands to run on the way. But he would have to wrap up this client’s account first thing in the morning; they were a big client—the twelfth-largest fence manufacturer in Urk!—and, well, the sooner they paid him, the better.
Saly packed up his leather satchel, checked the contents and the fastness of the buckles twice (all work should be checked twice, he always said!), then left the little office. He locked up outside—first lock, second, third, and so on, all the way down to the eighth. He tried the door handle twice as well.
He stepped back to look at the facade. Just a simple building, a street-level suite below a tailor. Cranitch Accounting read the big sign over the door, and below it, smaller, the addendum he’d tacked on just last year: And Financial Planning.
There was another sign below that one, the text even smaller, but somehow the only one that seemed to matter. Foreclosure.
Saly stuck his hands in his pockets and hurried away from the window. It was a bad look, that trio of signs. Not often was it a good one—but in this particular case, it felt like a joke and a punchline. It was particularly bad for business.
Two weeks. That was all he had left. Then—no, no. He couldn’t think about it. The day was done; it was time to get home.
(Now, it took one of two things in order to follow up the decision not to think about something with the nigh-impossible feat of not thinking about that thing. It took either incredible mastery of the mind and will, a stoic sort of zen state and acceptance of the flow of the billions of factors that sang their individual lines into the song of the universe, all exterior to the thinker’s own sphere of control. Or it took a baffling emptiness of the mind that made the first thought an exceptional circumstance and the lack of a following thought a return to the norm. One of these was found more readily than the other, but an encounter with either was like finding a grain of gold in a rushing spring river. Saly Cranitch—like most of his kind—possessed neither.)
He fidgeted with the strap of his bag as he walked. It wouldn’t be like this elsewhere; it was only because the local laws allowed the Urk banks to slap that sign up so early. He still had time! Business had been fine—just fine, until that sign went up. But in Urk, it doubled as a symbol of shame—a brand, red hot, the nail in the coffin to ensure business plummeted and the banks could swoop in all the sooner like starving vultures. Starving—ha! They did just fine.
He’d always done just fine, too. Until now, he’d always had enough business to turn a profit, cover his expenses. He was an accountant (and financial planner) for Eu’s sake! He knew his own books front, back, and sideways, knew just how much he needed for his bills, how to portion it all out. And he made that money. Sure, he’d fallen behind on rent, but it was only because—
Saly stopped in his tracks outside the big bay window of Foofaraway Exotic Haberdashery. Just on the other side of the glass, a pair of shoes had caught his eye.
“Real gold leaf,” he read quietly to himself from the sign below them. No kidding—and at that price? Well, they were exceptionally nice. And this store was known for great quality. And he’d had a stressful day…
Saly walked out the front door four minutes later with a bag in hand.
“Excuse me?” said a young man as he fell into step alongside Saly. A boy, really—early twenties, patchy scruff and a youthful overconfidence. He looked like a thug, but a clean thug with a meticulous grooming routine and a politeness that wouldn’t waver while punching someone’s lights out. Which was to say, he was muscular. Saly didn’t encounter much muscle in his line of work.
“Hm?” answered Saly. He gripped the bag with his new gold shoes a bit tighter.
“You’re Saly Cranitch, isn’t that right?”
Saly narrowed his eyes. “Do I know you? How do you know my name?”
“We saw you leave your office.”
“We?”
The boy gestured, and Saly cocked his head to peer around him. Walking on the boy’s other side was a pathetic-looking red spirit who seemed to have gotten caught in some old bits of metal like a turtle in floating trash. “We took a guess, given the sign.”
“The sign,” Saly said with an exasperated click. “The sign doesn’t mean anything, all right? It’s just the bank sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, upending people’s livelihoods—their lives, their family’s lives!”
“I meant the other sign,” said the boy. “The one that says ‘Cranitch Accounting.’”
“Oh. Right.” Saly’s shoulders slumped. Then he perked back up. “And the other bit—you saw that? ‘And Financial Planning.’”
The boy scratched his chin. “I think I recall that.”
“Because I also do financial planning.”
“I concluded as much.”
“I’m going this way, actually,” said Saly, pausing at the yawning arched entrance to an indoor plaza. “But thanks for the chat.”
“Ah, so are we,” said the boy as he and the spirit abruptly pivoted their course. They stuck to Saly’s side like cactus needles.
Saly delved into the bustling market space, perusing produce as he tried to ignore the appraising looks from the boy and the whimpering of the spirit.
“Actually, the other sign caught my eye as well,” said the boy. Ah—there he went, same as everyone. Saly tried to put more of his shoulder between the two of them, but he only had so much shoulder to work with. “A real shame. Downright unacceptable what the banks have lobbied for in this city. Isn’t that right? Sorry—I am just a traveler, but I’ve done a bit of research…”
“Inhumane!” said Saly, suddenly removing his shoulder from its role as bony sentinel holding the boy at bay.
The boy shook his head. “All for their own benefit. As soon as you falter, they stick out their leg to trip you. Entirely unfair when you’ve still got, oh, probably a few weeks to get caught up on your rent, I’m sure.”
“Exactly,” said Saly. He lifted a tin of doughnuts. “Do these look good? They smell good. I only stepped in for a few things the wife requested for dinner, but—oh, you know how it is, shopping on an empty stomach.” He tucked the tin under his arm without another thought.
The boy watched the tin find its new home with a curious expression, then returned his attention to Saly. “And you’ll be able to make rent in that time, I’m sure?”
Saly paused. “I—well, I would’ve been fine, but that sign in the window… bad for business…”
The boy sighed. “And they get away with it,” he said, almost seemingly to himself. Saly paid for his purchases, which included an apple tart, too—when had he picked that up?—and started back towards the street.
“Now, I wonder,” started the boy when they’d made it back out of the crowds. “What if you did a bit of work outside the office? Where that sign isn’t hanging over your head, you know?”
“What, like peddle my accounting—and financial planning—services down at the park? Who would take me seriously without an office?”
“Well—” the boy paused and turned a full circle. “Hold that thought, please. Beel?”
It took a moment—a moment during which Saly wondered why he was sticking around instead of finally shaking the strange boy—but then the spirit emerged from the crowded plaza, panicked and shaking.
“Too many legs,” he whined. “There are too many legs in the worlds, and they all look the same. You should’ve been keeping an eye on me!”
The boy offered only a stern cock of his head in answer as they hurried back over to Saly.
“Thank you very much,” said Saly, who had just finished purchasing a horse bridle from a very nice kiosk vendor. Saly didn’t own a horse, but one day he might, and there was just no beating the deal on the bridle.
The boy raised an eyebrow as he watched Saly add the purchase to the bag with his shoes.
“What?” said Saly defensively.
“Nothing, I just—”
“Listen, I’m only bad with my money. Honest! I’m really a very good accountant. And a good financial planner.”
“Oh, I believe it. But, as I was saying: what if you, you know, branched out a bit from your usual sort of role.”
“Oh, I’m an accountant and financial planner through and through,” said Saly. “It’s—well, it’s all I know. I don’t know that I’d be much good at something else.”
“Say it’s similar. Quite similar. In fact, it’s really just the same skillset applied in a slightly different… direction.”
“I don’t know where I’d find such a thing.”
“I have something in mind, actually. I’m looking for an accountant.”
“And—?”
“And financial planner. Yes. It’s a big job, though.”
“Big as in… quite a lot of numbers?”
“A lot of numbers, I’d expect.”
Saly’s pulse quickened, and he tugged at the front of his tight cotton shirt to let some air in. The way the boy talked about it, it almost sounded… well, it almost sounded indecent.
“I’m not sure,” said Saly. “It sounds like it’d be a big break from the routine…”
“But I’m sure you could use the money. It’d cover your rent.”
Saly fiddled with a button on his jacket. “Well, the thing about that is… I may be more than a month late on rent…”
“It’ll cover what you need.”
Saly raised his eyebrows. “That much? You don’t know what I owe.”
“It’s certainly less than seven hundred helixes, I should hope.”
The figure nearly caused Saly to drop his belongings. Numbers flew around his mind. “Seven—seven hundred?”
“Yes.”
“Are you… who are you?”
The boy put out his hand. “Sorry—my name is Azriah. Let me write down an address for you.”