The Fine Print

The Thieves Guild, written by Jake Kerr, chapter twenty six. The fine printing. The boots were wearing thin. Vesper had noticed it that morning, a slight roughness where the soul met the cobblestones. He had owned these boots for three years. They had carried him through countless missions, silent and sure. Now they were betraying him, one step at a time. It was, he reflected, a fitting metaphor for his new life. The sun was setting over the Craft Quarter as Vesper climbed the steps to his tower for the fourth time that day. His legs ached, his back ached, even his eyes ached from squinting at ledgers and lists and the endless stream of faces that demanded his attention. Being a guild master was exhausting. As a blade, Vesper had been invisible. He had moved through the city like a shadow, noticed by no one, answerable to no one except Orion himself. His work had been simple, find the problem, remove the problem, disappear. Now everyone wanted a piece of him. He had to vet candidates for empty captain positions, a job full of glad handing and politicking, exactly the things he hated. The regular Craft Guild members wanted assurances. Who was this new guild master? How come we had never heard of him? Was it true? He was Orion's Blade? And the jewelers were taking on the task of creating the new guild seal with the reverence it probably demanded, but with a time frame. Vesper found unbearable the seal, that bloody seal. Without it, he was a guild master in person only. Every order he gave had to be delivered by himself. Every decision had to be witnessed. He couldn't send a simple note across the city without walking there himself to confirm its authenticity. To day alone, he had traveled to the weaver's district to settle a dispute over loom allocations, then to the smith's district to name a new captain, a gruff woman named Hera, who looked at him like he was something she'd scraped off her anville. Then back to the tower for a meeting with Odo, the ancient clerk, who seemed determined to bury him in paperwork. Then out again to the docks to inspect a shipment of iron that some one claimed was substandard. That person was right, it had been substandard. Vesper had no idea what to do about that. If he had a seal, he'd send a note to Polo to alert him to issues in the mines. But now he told them to sort it out and walked away. Now he was back in his office, slumped in the comfortable chair that was the only good thing about this job, staring at the pile of papers on his desk. They had multiplied while he was gone. They always multiplied. Write to work. He reached for the top document, some complaint from the chandlers about candle wax, and set it aside. Then another, a request for additional workers to add defenses to the tower. Another a proposal to expand the apprentice quarters, which in turn would require more defense requests and more guards. Another he stopped Carch's document, the one from this morning, the routine matter that the merchant guild Master had been so eager for him to sign. Esper picked it up, turning the pages in his hands. It looked dry and indeed boring, but it was at least something that wasn't craft gild business. He had barely glanced at it early and passed it over, but he had been tired, overwhelmed, desperate to get at least some things of practical importance done now in the quiet of the evening, With nothing but a guttering candle for company, Vesper began to read. The first page was as dull as Carch had promised. Payment schedules, interest calculations, a list of shops and merchants, and stock values that meant nothing to Vesper. His eyes began to glaze over. The second page was worse. Legal terminology piled upon legal terminology, each clause referencing three others, each paragraph dense with words that seemed designed to confuse rather than clarify. It reminded him that he would need to name a captain of state for such matters, and if none existed, he'd create it. Then then there was a continuation on the next page, with language that essentially said nothing. That didn't necessarily surprise him. But the paragraph was so dense and longer than the rest of the document that it looked odd. Vesper looked closer and immediately had a suspicious thought. Karch was definitely hiding something. He forced himself to slow down to read each word carefully, to trace the references from clause to clause. It was tedious work, the kind of work that made him long for the simple clarity of a blade in the dark. And then there it was a reference, not to other clauses, but an explicit statement of all debts and obligations. Vesper wasn't a statesman or money counter, but he knew what the word all meant, and staring at him, buried in text was an acknowledgment that, due to the illegal nature of previous guildmaster commitments, the document releases and forever discharges all claims, debts and obligations. Vesper read the sentence again, then again. Then he flipped back to the beginning of the document and read the whole thing from the start, his understanding now colored by what he had discovered. Twas elegant, he had to admit the document appeared to be a minor adjustment to a payment schedule between the guilds, But buried in the middle, disguised by language so convoluted it would make a lawyer weep, was a clause that would forgive every debt the Merchant Guild owed to the Craft Guild, every single debt. Vesper set the document down and stared at the wall. His immediate thought was how much debt there actually was. He knew in general terms that the Merchant Guild owed money to the craft Guild. Everyone knew that Larsen had borrowed heavily to fund his schemes, and those debts had passed to his successor. But until this moment, Vesper had not understood what that meant. If this document was real, if the debts were significant enough that Carch would go to such length to erase them, then the kraft Gild didn't just have money owed to them, They had leverage over the merchants, perhaps significant leverage. Vesper laughed. It was a quiet sound, barely more than a breath, but it echoed in the empty office like a thunderclap. Carch, the great spider at the center of his web, the man who had installed Vesper on this comfortable chair, who had beat Polo at his own game, who had created this whole leadership dynamic within ness, did it all for one reason. He was desperate. Vesper wanted to know how desperate Oder would know, or he would know who would know. Vesper picked up the document again and weighed it in his hands. Such a small thing, a few pages of paper, and yet it represented more power than Vesper had ever held in his life. He could sign it honor his own personal debt to Kash for making his guild mastership happen, release the debts, and maintain the alliance that had put him in this chair. Or he could refuse, hold the document over Carch's head, use it as leverage to extract whatever he wanted from the Merchant Guild. Vesper set the document carefully on the corner of his desk, separate from the other papers. He would need to think about this, consider his options, decide what kind of guild master he wanted to be. But first he needed to know just how desperate Carch was. He now knew he had leverage over the Merchant Guild. The next step was to know how much he called out a new found excitement in his voice. Odo MHM a podcast Alchemy production