Part 2 of the Letters and Ledgers series

The other letter went out a week later.

Flinch wrote it himself, which was new — he’d carried messages before, copied things out, made sure the wording was right for the person it was going to. This was different. This was his own words to someone he hadn’t met, about something he’d only half understood when Master had first described it to him, explaining a pipe network and a magical intelligence and a watching scroll and the long pipes between them, all of it in the careful breathless way of a person who understands the shape of something but isn’t certain he’s found the right words for it yet.

He addressed it to Nobbybanks, care of the Bank of Ironforge, which was the address he’d found in one of UG‘s older correspondence files, and he signed it formally, because Flinch suspected — from what he knew of the man, which was secondhand and therefore uncertain — that Nobbybanks was a person who noticed when things were done properly.

He sent it down the pipe. He waited.

The reply came back tidy, which he’d expected, and dry, which he’d expected, and with three questions he hadn’t been able to answer in the original letter, which he hadn’t expected but probably should have.

He wrote back. He answered the questions. He left the fourth question — the one about the acquisition interest and what “interested” actually meant in practice — because he didn’t know the answer and had learned to say so rather than invent one.

The correspondence went on like that for three weeks. By the end of it Flinch had a reasonable sense of what Nobbybanks was going to do when he arrived, and a less reasonable but equally strong sense that he was going to need more tea on than he usually kept.

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More in the Letters and Ledgers series

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