Part 9 of the The World Can’t Wait series
There was no letter to Nobbybanks that evening, not at first, because UG spent a good twenty minutes drafting one and decided against every version.
The Scourge at Light’s Hope had dropped a bit of gold, same as Scourge always did, and by the time he’d totted it up against the repair bill for everything Arator‘s whole day had cost him in armour integrity, the honest total came to somewhere around the cost of the repairs themselves. Not a profit. Barely a wash. UG looked at the number, decided he’d rather not look at it too closely himself either, and wrote the letter anyway.
Nobbybanks,
Good day today. Cleared out a fair bit of Scourge round Light’s Hope, turned a tidy profit doing it. Off to Blackrock Mountain next, and I don’t mind telling you, there’s bound to be plunder up there. I’ll be in good shape by the time I’m back.
— UG
He did not mention the repair bill. He did not mention that “a tidy profit” and “1,039 gold, total, after expenses” were not, by any reasonable accounting, the same sentence. He sent it anyway, on the grounds that Nobbybanks would find out the real number eventually regardless, and there was no sense both of them being miserable about it on the same evening.
Nobbybanks was not fooled for a second. He’d been doing this long enough to read “tidy profit” as a man’s polite way of saying “please don’t look too closely,” and the number, when he did look closely, did nothing to change his mind. He sat with it for a while, somewhere between amused and genuinely concerned, and decided that what this situation actually called for was a proper look at the wider picture. Not just UG’s balance. Every client he had on the books, gold in the bank against gold that ought to be in the bank — partly so he’d know where things actually stood, and partly because it would be considerably easier to feel calm about UG’s number once he had a few larger ones sitting next to it for comparison.
He wrote to all of them that same night. Every account he managed, every adventurer who’d ever trusted him with their gold, one identical request sent out in a single evening: send the current figure, no explanations needed, no judgement implied. Most of them would take their time about it, the way people always did with a question that made them add up their own poor decisions. Nobbybanks settled in to wait.
UG, for his part, had already moved on to a different plan entirely: there was a great deal of accumulated junk lying round the tower that had never earned its keep, and it occurred to him, not for the first time, that a proper clear-out might do more for his finances than any amount of Scourge-killing. He didn’t act on it that night. But he thought about it, which for UG was most of the way to a plan.
More in the The World Can’t Wait series
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