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The Black Eagle had become too expensive for Brother Hamon’s dwindling funds, and he was too proud to accept Lady Moira’s offer to find him someplace nicer. So he had moved to a nastier, cheaper inn, closer to the docks, called the Prefectus Arcus. And yet, Brother Gauther had no trouble finding him at all.
Gauther was a Brigantian, a native of the Empire, but he was a Leofine monk, like Hamon, and he lived at a small Priory in the town of Voyalik, a suburb of Presidium. The letter from Abbot Norswith back in Formacaster had gone there, instead of directly to Hamon, so Brother Gauther had ventured into the city to look for him.
“I think your abbot was under the impression you’d be staying with us,” said Gauther, looking personally offended that Hamon hadn’t.
“Well, I have to be in town for my business,” explained Hamon. He opened the letter and asked Gauther to wait downstairs for his reply.
Hamon hadn’t answered directly to Abbot Norswith for four years, since he had gone to court, but the abbot still felt free to give him commands.
Although the Order still supports King Broderick II in theory, it is time to reconcile ourselves to the practical realities of the situation. The Bishops of Formacaster and Leornian recognize Edwin Sigor as the rightful claimant, and I am afraid that we must bow to their wisdom. It is time for you to return home to us.
Hamon shook his head, muttered an oath under his breath, then read on.
Indeed, I had expected that you would have done so already. It seems to me, Brother Hamon, that perhaps you have become too comfortable in the wider world. Life at court has perhaps tempted you with finery and pomp and glamor. You must remember that all earthly glory is in vain compared to the glory of Earstien and his angels.
Hamon chuckled at that. “As it happens, abbot,” he muttered to himself, “I think I know a bit more about the glory of hillichmagnars than you do.”
He wrote out a quick, vague reply, saying he had a few last items of business to attend to, and that he would return to the monastery “as soon as possible.” Then he sent it off with Brother Gauther and walked up to the university district, where he met Lady Moira for lunch.
When he told her about the letter from the abbot, her beautiful face fell. “You’re not really leaving, are you?” she asked.
“No, of course not,” he replied. And her smile returned in a way that made him feel very much like he never wanted to go back to the monastery again.
They talked a little about the “alternative funding” she said she was arranging for the Gramirens, though she remained a bit vague on the details. Hamon didn’t know if she was being coy because she didn’t trust him, or if she wanted to hide the fact that the funding source wasn’t as secure as she pretended. Or if she was just being coy to be coy.
Finally, when they had pushed their plates of greasy fish bones away and washed their hands in their finger bowls, and when they had new cups of cider, she asked, “Have you decided whether you trust me enough to tell me where the rightful King of Myrcia is hiding?”
He had known the question was coming, yet he only made up his mind at that very moment. This woman was a hillichmagnar; she possessed a portion of Earstien’s own divine power. She said she supported the Gramirens, and he believed her. And beyond all that, she had already done more to help the royal family than anyone else in the Empire. Or anyone else in Myrcia. She had done more, now that he thought of it, than his abbot, the Bishop of Leornian, and the whole blasted Leafa church.
“Yes, I’ll tell you,” he said. “But not here. Some place we won’t be overheard.”
They left the restaurant and crossed the street for a stroll around the park. As they walked, Lady Moira explained the various steps that she and her “friends” could take to ensure that both the royal family and the treasure were well-protected.
“I don’t doubt that King Broderick has his own guards,” she said, “but I can use magy. I can spell objects and make them into traps and alarms, so that no one can approach the treasure without our people being alerted. Or the royal family, either.”
“I knew I could trust you,” he said happily, “you are an angel, after all.”
She didn’t reply at first, and when he turned to look at her, she seemed distinctly downcast.
“The truth, Brother Hamon, is that I am not a very good angel, as angels go.”
“Nonsense. You’re perfect.”
“I am far from being perfect. I have done things, I’m afraid, that no hillichmagnar is ever supposed to do.”
“Well, the Halig Leoth tells us that anyone who shows true contrition will be forgiven. Even hillichmagnars.”
She drew closer to him. “But that’s the thing, Brother Hamon. I’m not sorry for anything I’ve done. Earstien knows, I’ve tried to feel sorry. But I can never manage it.”
He could hardly breathe, and a distinctly unreligious feeling throbbed under his habit, in his old dust-stained trousers.
Now she turned, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath as she whispered, “In fact, I miss those things, Brother Hamon. And I want to do them with you.”
Her house was nearby, and they barely had the front door closed before she pushed him against the wall and kissed him. He’d never been kissed that way before, hard and urgent, with her tongue sliding into his mouth. He tried to turn, as she pressed her body against him, so that she wouldn’t feel the shameful bulge in his trousers, but she turned, too, and pushed against it, letting out a little gasp of delight as she did so.
Trading kisses back and forth with him, she led the way through the house to a back parlor, where wide glass doors opened onto a shady garden. He couldn’t see anyone in the garden, and a wall closed it off from the street, but even so, he felt terribly self-conscious with all that glass there. This was all so very wrong, and he trembled at the thought that anyone might see him.
She, on the other hand, felt no such compunctions. She made him sit on the edge of a long settee. He tried to pull her down with him, but she shook off his hands and said, “Not quite yet.” Then she knelt between his legs, lifted his white scapular and gray robe in the front, and ducked her head underneath.
He could feel her fingers gently undoing the laces of his old trousers, and then reaching in and drawing out his cock. And then her lips around him, warm and wet, soft but with a steady, firm pressure.
“Oh, Earstien,” he thought. “This can’t be right, can it? Not with one of your angels, surely.”
But he didn’t want her to stop. When she pulled away, in fact, only a minute or so later, it was all he could do not to grab her head and guide her back.
Now she undressed him, pulling off his habit and his shirt all at once, and then slowly easing his trousers and underpants down. Her Immani gown proved much easier to remove—she undid two small clasps and let it all fall away. She wasn’t wearing any sort of underclothes at all, and her body was more beautiful than he could possibly have imagined. She was lean and muscular, built like a girl athlete from some Thessalian vase.
“Have you ever done this before?” she asked.
He didn’t need to ask what she was talking about. “No.”
“Not even with the boys in your monastery?” She smiled. “That’s a shame. Ah well.” She pushed him down on the settee and then straddled him. “Let me do the work, then.”
She took hold of him and guided him up inside her. He nearly came in the first few seconds—the feeling of her, tight and wet around him, was so unexpectedly glorious.
“If monks all knew what this felt like,” he thought, “there wouldn’t be an oath of celibacy anymore.”
He watched her, rising and falling, muscles flexing under her satiny pale skin, and he could see she was enjoying this, too, panting and moaning. He wanted to hold on, for her sake if not his, but he couldn’t stop himself. Less than a minute after they started, he came, and he could hardly breathe from the shocking intensity of the feeling.
He felt a spasm of something close to pain when, in dismounting from him, she happened to brush the head of his cock by accident.
“I’m...I’m so sorry it ended so soon,” he croaked.
“Not to worry,” she said. “You’ll build up your stamina with practice.” Then she gave him a wicked grin and said, “In the meantime, there’s something else you could do for me.”
She taught him to use his tongue and his fingers on her. Hamon had been trained in calligraphy and playing the harp, and he was very good at moving his fingers precisely. She told him he was a very quick learner, and praised his technique, but it still took him a while to get it right. He knew it when he did, though, because she screamed, all the candles in the room burned blue for half a second, and then she curled up in a ball on the settee, twitching and swearing.
He poured two glasses of wine at her sideboard and brought them over. She was still shaking slightly. Putting his arms around her, he leaned in and whispered, “They’re in Terminium, at a safehouse. They’re under an assumed name."
“Who are?” she said dreamily.
“The royal family. The Gramirens.”
“Oh, yes.” She rolled over, took his hand, and kissed it. “It’s so good to know that you trust me. Do they have the treasure with them there?”
“No, it’s never left Myrcia,” he said, smiling at her evident surprise. “It’s in Rawdon somewhere safe.”
“Oh, I think Faustinus and I could find a way to keep it safer.”
They spent the night together in her bed, and in the morning, he told her, “I don’t think I can be a monk anymore.”
She kissed him. “In that case, I think I have an idea what you could do instead.” But she didn’t say any more about it as they dressed and went downstairs for breakfast.
As they were cleaning up after the meal, Gina arrived with many letters and messages for Moira. The girl seemed very pleased to see him there, and winked at him twice when Moira had her back turned.
At first this embarrassed him, but then he thought, “Why do I care if she knows?”
Moira wrote some replies to her mail, gave them to Gina, and said, “See if you can persuade Quintus to join us here this morning.”
“Quintus Verrus, the loan officer at the Procellus Bank?” asked Hamon.
“Exactly,” said Moira. “Though he won’t be working there much longer. Like you, he’s moving on to something new and exciting.”
When Gina returned with Quintus in tow, Moira took them all through to the back parlor. Hamon couldn’t help but blush when she took the settee, and at first he couldn’t look at her, sitting there, without remembering what they had done on that very spot only hours earlier.
“You two gentlemen have met,” she said, gesturing for them each to have a seat. “But what you don’t know, Hamon, is that Quintus is starting a new bank with us. And what you haven’t learned yet, Quintus, is that Hamon is helping us with our funding. At least in this first phase. You see, we can use the treasures the Gramirens so thoughtfully removed from Formacaster when they fled as capital to start the bank.”
Hamon nodded slowly at Quintus as so much suddenly became clear to him, except for a problem he noticed immediately. “Wait. You want to use the treasure from the royal family as capital for the bank? That doesn’t even make sense, because if the bank is based on the collateral from the royal family, then where does the money come from that you will loan them? Isn’t that...inventing money out of nothing?”
“Not quite,” said Moira.
“Actually,” said Quintus, “that’s a fairly good description of what banking is. The physical gold and silver is pretty much a placeholder for value.”
Hamon had been taught from an early age to despise money and material things, but even so, he recognized the importance of gold and silver in the world. “That’s impossible,” he said. “If there’s no gold, where’s the money?”
“Oh, there will be some gold,” said Quintus with an airy wave of his hand. “Which we will be getting from the Procurator’s office at the Treasury on the basis of the funds the royal family has promised us.” He reached into a satchel at his side and pulled out a small ledger bound in green leather. “This is where the money exists.”
He passed the ledger over, and Hamon looked at the various columns. Over on the left side, he saw an entry in blue ink that said, “Loan to Broderick II, King of the Myrcians.”
He had done it! The loan had been made, and the Gramiren family would fight another day. He had done it, thanks to these people. He had done it, while the whole court and all the nobles of Myrcia and the stupid Duke of Severn were still sitting around twiddling their collective thumbs and wondering what they could do to help.
“Amazing,” he said. “And this really works?”
“Oh, yes,” said Quintus. “It’s worked beautifully since the Thessalian banks invented finance in the days of the Thessalian Empire.”
Moira gave Hamon a little smile and said, “I’ve heard it said that it’s the second best idea the Thessalians ever had.” Gina and Quintus both started snickering. Hamon figured out what she meant, and was starting to blush, when she added, “The best idea, of course, being baklava.”
They all laughed, and then Moira said, “Quintus, I’ve been thinking that since Hamon has generously arranged our initial funding, you might consider hiring him as our senior manager. He’s decided to leave the monastic life.”
Gina gave Hamon an exaggerated wink and said, “I wonder what on earth could have prompted that?”
“Brilliant!” said Quintus. “Assuming you want the job, Brother Hamon. In the eastern branches of some of the bigger banks—in Myrcia or Zekustia, for example—they often hire men who were trained at monasteries. I’m sure you have an excellent hand.”
Hamon looked from Quintus, to Gina, to Moira (who was fighting not to laugh), and then back to Quintus. This seemed almost too good to be true. Deep down, a tiny voice told him this was all very wrong, and he was betraying his vows. But another voice, rather louder, told him that surely things wouldn’t all work out this way if Earstien hadn’t intended for this to happen.
“Fine,” he said, reaching over and shaking Quintus’s hand. “Fine, I’ll do it!”