Django Wexler - The Shadow Throne

His other hand emerged from his coat pocket holding a match. He struck it on the stone of the column, and it flared brilliantly for a moment, provoking an intake of breath from the crowd. Danton held it to the corner of the bill, and it grudgingly took fire, curling up toward his fingers and gouting thick black smoke.

“This is what their promises are worth, when all is said and done,” Danton said. As the flames licked toward his fingers, he let the bill fall, blazing as it drifted to the stone. “And we have to make them see it, too.”

He turned his back on the still-burning bill and walked off the rostrum. Faro would be waiting for him on the steps, ready to hustle him out of the square. In the meantime, the crowd waited in stunned silence for a few long moments, not quite realizing that the speech was over. Then, as if on cue, it erupted in a single voice, a throaty combination of a roar of triumph and a scream of rage.

At the center of the tight-packed mob were the vagrants from the Third. They’d waited patiently for Danton to appear, but now that he was done, they were eager to receive their promised reward. They began to shove their way through the crowd in a body, headed east, for the bridges that connected the Island with the Exchange. The rest of the crowd parted to let them pass, then filled in behind them, dragged onward by curiosity and the power of Danton’s voice. It was like a comet falling to earth, with the vagrants at the head and everyone else as the trailing, blazing tail, aimed directly at the Vordan headquarters of the Second Pennysworth Bank.

“My word,” Sarton said, looking down from the balcony. “There m. . m. . must be a thousand carriages down there.”

Faro, uncharacteristically, had thought ahead and reserved a balcony suite in the Grand, one of Vordan’s finest hotels. It overlooked the Exchange and happened to have an excellent view of the granite-and-marble facade of the Second Pennysworth Bank. So Raesinia, leaning on the balcony rail, had a box seat at the grand spectacle of one of mankind’s classic debacles: a run on the bank.

The Exchange was actually larger than Farus’ Triumph, but not nearly as impressive. It was simply a large, open, irregular space, dirt-floored and rutted with cart tracks. On a normal day it would have been scattered with clusters of men seated at tables or behind portable desks, with flags fluttering behind them on little poles like the pennantry of medieval jousters. Other men milled around them, running from one station to another, shouting incomprehensibly and receiving shouts or hand signals in return. Cora had explained it to Raesinia, once: each station was a gathering of those interested in buying or selling a particular thing or class of thing, with the seated men representing the large, established firms and the ones who shuttled back and forth their prospective customers. Hundreds of millions of eagles changed hands here daily, in some ethereal way that involved nothing so concrete as a handshake. A shout, a thumbs-up, or a nod of the head was enough to start a chain reaction that, hundreds of miles away, might cause a ship to be loaded with goods and sent off around the world.

And Vordan was only a distant third among the great commercial cities, Cora said. The Bourse in Hamvelt was bigger, and the mighty Common Market of Viadre was large enough to swallow them both together with room to spare. Cora talked about the Common Market of Viadre in the same dreamy way that a priest might discuss the kingdom of heaven.

Today, though, all that had been roughly overturned, the tables knocked aside, the traders driven away by the mob. The banks ringed the periphery of the Exchange, their templelike construction seeking to impress a sense of their permanence and majesty by sheer force of architecture. The Second Pennysworth was one of the newest among these, a Borelgai transplant, and its building was the grandest of all. A queue-if something so disorderly could be dignified with the name-stretched from its doors and wound out into the Exchange, until it lost its identity and dissolved into a sea of pushing, shouting men.

Carriages were normally banned from the Exchange, but today none of the rules seemed to apply. They had begun to arrive not long after Danton’s speech, and as the hours passed the trickle had become a flood. Moreover, the vehicles that turned up had been getting grander and grander, sporting coats of arms and liveried footmen, until it seemed that half the nobility of Vordan was crammed into the market.

Somewhat at the head of the line were the vagrants Cora and Raesinia had handed out bills to the night before. They had served as the pebbles that, tossed onto a snowy slope, dislodge a growing, rolling avalanche of ice and dirt that flattens villages in the valley below. Raesinia watched with an odd mix of awe and terror as the thing she’d created roared onward, devouring everything in its path.

It was all about fear, Cora had explained. Banks were built on trust, and the antithesis of trust was fear. Even with the profits she’d made, they didn’t have enough capital to hurt a behemoth like the Second Pennysworth. But a little priming of the pump, combined with the magic of Danton’s voice, meant they didn’t have to.

Inside the bank, some poor manager was watching his worst nightmares come true. In theory, anyone who held one of those bills was entitled to turn up at the door, whenever they liked, and demand actual clinking metallic stuff in exchange. The bank’s very existence was predicated on its ability to meet these promises. In practice, of course, only a few people would do this, but every banker lived in fear of the day that the people who had entrusted him with their money turned up en masse to demand it back. For the Second Pennysworth, that day was today. Every man in the queue had a bill he wanted paid now , for fear the bank would not be around tomorrow to pay it. Every bill had to be met with coin from the cashiers, with strained, frozen smiles. But there was not enough coin in the vaults for everyone, and the crowd knew it.

Shortly after opening, a Second Pennysworth official had come out to proclaim, nervously, that the bank was completely sound and no one had anything to worry about. He’d even tried a little joke, to the effect that if people wanted to set fire to bills of his bank, that was completely all right with him, since it would after all only make it sounder.

It hadn’t helped. Everyone knew that bank managers only said things like that when they were worried; when the banks actually were sound, they sat in their offices and met complaints with an angry, scornful silence. Everyone in the Triumph had heard Danton’s speech, then watched a squadron of determined-looking people march across to the Exchange and head straight for the Second Pennysworth to turn in their bills. That was enough for many, and the sight of the queue stretching out past the doors tipped the balance. The bank had become a sinking ship, and no one wanted to be the one left without a lifeboat.

“There’s a line at the Crown, look,” Cora said. “And another at Spence amp; Jackson. It’s spreading.”

“Of course,” Raesinia said. “If a respectable institution like the Second Pennysworth can go down just because someone gives a speech, then what other bank could be safe? Much better to cram your coin in a sock and hide it under your mattress.”

“I should have invested in socks,” Cora said. “Or mattresses.”

Raesinia patted her on the shoulder. “Sorry. This must be hard for you to watch.”

“Not. . exactly.” Cora looked momentarily shifty. “It has its advantages.”

Raesinia quirked an interrogative eyebrow. Cora sighed.

“I was going to tell you,” she said. “But there wasn’t time.”