5 for Iron Bank, 3 for Arsenal, 2 for Temples.
First things were, obviously, first. I had some vague ideas of what made Braavos famous, but without more information I had no idea of how to infiltrate them. I couldn't just walk up to the local beggar and ask how to get hired at the Iron Bank after all.
No, better to start by picking the low hanging fruit. So I got a job as a dock hand. The work was dull, but still a lot easier and less monotonous than rowing. There's a reason a lot of galleys use whips, no one would want to sit around all day doing that same old thing otherwise… and I suppose the labor was pretty tiring as well.
"You're Westerosi eh. You speak Low Valyrian?"
"No, but I speak High Valyrian."
"Bah, High Valyrian is only useful for lords and scholars, the tongue used by the Free Cities has maybe a tenth in common with High Valyrian. The Trade Tongue has almost nothing in common with either of them."
"Is it important that I speak them immediately? I can learn languages pretty quickly."
"Not really, we'll put you over by the ships bringing in Westerosi goods, if you can read the labels or recognize the sigils then that'll be good enough to sort the cargo."
"Alright. What's the pay?"
"You get paid three iron pennies per day."
"Iron?"
"Why did you think it was called the Iron Bank?"
"Eh, I figured it had to do with their lending tactics. Still, how can people use iron for coins?"
"It buys the same as gold around here, all that matters is the mark stamped on it. Word of warning though, don't try to get clever with some smithing and make your own coins, the folks around here can spot the difference, and the bank doesn't let forgers live long."
"Don't even know how to swing a hammer. Besides, honest work always seemed simpler than trying to reckon out ways of working around the law."
"Good, good. You start an hour before dawn, if you don't show up you're out of work."
I knew of barter from the Free Folk, and had been introduced to coinage by the Watch, gotten my first pay in Westerosi copper pennies while as a rower, but everything I'd heard seemed to indicate that metals like gold and silver had wealth of their own. Yet the Iron Bank put the lie to this by making their coins out of seemingly worthless metal.
Was value all according to those around you? Warm furs may have been luxury in the north, but here it was wines and silks.
I learned later that because the Argent Gift was a Braavosi ship I had actually gotten lucky and landed at the Purple Harbor. So I was among the ships and cargo of the Braavosi captains and the Iron Bank itself. Braavosi ships berthed at Braavos, so their end cargo needed to come here and be offloaded, regardless of what lands the cargo had originated from. If the dock hands couldn't figure out what it was supposed to be then they'd be less effective at sorting it. So getting the job was really as simple as that. The fact that I had just come off a ship docked in the Purple Harbor itself probably gave me a good reference all its own too.
I slept on the peers most nights, woke up before the dawn and worked the day. At night the other port workers would all head off to drink a bit, though not enough that they couldn't show up for work the next day.
Low Valyrian was actually easier than anticipated. Maybe it was because I already knew High Valyrian, maybe it was because I was constantly surrounded by native speakers, but I picked up a working vocabulary within a month and felt confident in another two. I could have just dropped my body and picked up a local, but if anything that would have just aroused suspicion over why a local didn't know his way about the city.
So I bided my time.
Trade tongue is harder, I'm not sure it's even possible to really master it, since no one is a native speaker and the specifics all change from port to port, it's extremely complex with a lot of small additions and fluidity. The main rule is really just to make yourself understood in any way possible.
The dock hands, the ones that are locals anyway, all say that there are two things you have to do to understand the city; see the Isle of Gods, and climb the Titan.
The Titan is probably the tallest building in the world, not counting the Wall, but I don't count the wall since it's so long that it supports itself, and they toss on more ice every season. A building that needs major seasonal repair is not a good building.
From the top here, you can see not just the endless horizon, but the obvious curvature of the sea. Supposedly the Dragon Lords could fly so high that they could see their entire empire at once. The maesters do say that the world is round, that to go to the edge of the Sunset Sea and you'll hit the back side of Essos. Staring off the Titan almost makes me believe it.
The Isle of Gods is far more dangerous. There's a Heart Tree there. I hadn't thought that even across the Narrow Sea that the gods of Earth and Tree would still have influence. I decided to wait and make some inquiries about what the various gods stood for first before returning there.
It was only after I had gotten a firm grip on the language of the Free Cities that I could really start making inroads in the city. My plan was to get hired by the Iron Bank somehow and use that as a way of furthering my abilities with finance and administration as well as collecting information about trading, ships and even possibly more exotic knowledge such as distant lands and magics.
Apparently the testing to be an initial clerk was extremely simple, all it required was a steady hand for writing accounts, a facility with numbers and the ability to speak at least two of the major languages of Essos. These requirements cut down the initial list of prospective employees down to a few hundredths of the number their might otherwise have been.
After that stage they send off enquiries into those left, to weed out spies from competing banks as well as the odd thief.
Not seeing any real risk, I went ahead and applied with the rest of the new intake. I spent a few days getting the fingers and hands to start remembering the shapes and to start following my direction better. Still sloppier than I wished, but it would do for now. My old training with runes and experience in writing helped tremendously here.
The low level clerks were not initially expected to know more than their sums, so that test went well. Then tests of language passed without any problems. It was only after I had been working there for a month that the third test arrived.
"Sigmund of White Harbor is it? We've sent inquires to White Harbor about you. They uncovered that you immediately fled aboard the Argent Gift after two men were murdered and that your sister was forced to resort to whoring herself out."
"… So a talented amateur turned professional, is that my problem? As for the murders, I really didn't have much choice, not with the Manderlys running things."
"Oh, we'd heard that you had a very close relationship with your sister."
"It's no secret that families do not always act the same in private as they do in public. Seeming close tended to get more help from the neighbors. The 'cute siblings' would get a little extra work or an extra slice of bread. A begging tactic really."
"And the Manderly matter, with the murder?"
"Who did you think did the killings? I was having a few drinks with this black brother… erm, that's a member of the Night's Watch, and he said that someone was replacing barrels and skimming the difference. The only people with that much pull in White Harbor would be the Manderlys themselves. The agreement with the Watch goes back since before the Manderlies even had lands in the north, so naturally if it became public they would be shamed."
"How is it that a lowly dock hand managed to do sums well enough to enter the Iron Bank?"
"Numbers always came easy to me, the harbor master back in Westeros liked that he didn't have to pay me real wages, so I got some experience there. I wanted to be a sailor or merchant, but none I knew that none of the captains would take a chance on me. So when the chance came to become a rower and get out of some danger I took it. Then I practiced a bit with the cargo I was unloading in the Purple Harbor, to hone my skills, and applied."
"Hm, I see. Please place some of this on your cheek." He hands me a bowl of something
"What is it?"
"Flame paste, to cause rashes." I nod without understanding and do as instructed, a man comes by with a lantern and waves it in front of my face. "Faceless Men wear the faces of the dead, and dead flesh cannot form rashes, while those that use light or shadow can form illusions but sudden changes in light, such as those from the lantern, with distort them for a moment."
"I see. Thank you for telling me." I assumed I had passed this test as well.
From there the level of responsibility became infinitely greater, because I previously was given no real responsibility. I was placed as a junior in accounts for investment in the North-Coast sector, the poorest sector since it was just Lorath, Saath and Ibben. I would have been on the Westeros sector, but apparently no-one with money from there would trust a man without a title to handle their wealth.
I had to learn percentages and fractions, so as to calculate interest rates. The fundamentals were interesting though, debt as a form of wealth, wealth as merely a number in an account separate from any held valuables, that sort of thing shocked me at first, further twisting my understanding of money and barter.
Conversion rates between currencies and forms of barter were troublesome. If gold and silver had universal value, then the worth of their coins could at least be said to be the value of their metals. Yet, with some coins being iron or many other mixes of metals, or in some places a form of barter being used, the system starts to break down. It seems that the value of coinage is given as whichever is higher, the value of the materials it's made of, or the buying power that comes from association with the city that minted it.
After a few months of improvement I was handed a small black book
"This is your investment table. It shows the variables you'll need to check for merchant ships, add up the flaws to see how good an investment the ship is."
"Just the ship? Not the captain or cargo as well?"
"It's part of the elimination, if the ship is likely to sink or be damaged in some way then we won't even talk to the captain about his plans."
"Ah, ok."
"Now, see here? These are the hull types, a hull in this style is an Ironborn ship. The first rule is to never invest with the Ironborn, since their ships can't haul enough cargo they can't pay off their debts regularly from raiding and they almost always default. We've told them before to get ships with a bigger hold, but they're so stuck in their tradition.
"Also, check for the condition of the crew. The Iron Bank doesn't explicitly care about the condition of slaves, as long as they don't step foot on Braavos itself, but if half of them look like they're about to die of disease then they probably wouldn't make it to the next port anyway."
"What about the next step of the process? After I confirm that the ship is sound?"
"Then I take over. If the ship is sound then the cargo and navigation plan has to be profitable as well. The longer the voyage the riskier it is, the more likely mishaps are, but at the same time the greater the rewards are. A small voyage to Westeros or Lorath from here would be very safe, but also would barely cover the costs of the preparations."
"What kind of preparations need so much money?"
"Food and water mostly. The bigger the ship the more crew you have, the more crew the more mouths, the more mouths the more food you need. Generally it's smarter to load up for only half your voyage and then get supplies for the way back at the next port. This'll allow you to have as little unprofitable cargo as possible. However, this also means that if anything goes wrong you'll likely starve."
"So why don't people just use bigger ships? That way they'll have more cargo space and thus more ability to make money and have more food and water in stock?"
"A couple of reasons. First, the cost of a large ship is much higher than that of a couple of smaller ones. Bigger ships are also more tempting targets for pirates. Plus, you don't as good of a return. Since bigger ships take more crew, you need to fill up more of your (now larger) hold to feed them. Eventually this would actually be beneficial, but the number of larger ships needed to make the difference would be significant, and the loss of any one of them would be ruinous."
"So a larger fleet of smaller trading vessels is the way to go?"
"Certainly so if you want to spread them around."
"Oh, no I meant for large trade voyages, like Corlys Velaryon. Didn't he basically turn back when his holds were full?"
"No, he turned back when he reached the ends of the maps he could buy. The furthest the Sarnori ever got was Nefer, and that was the map he was using. Corlys wasn't an explorer, he didn't take unnecessary chances."
"Do we get any trade in from Nefer?"
"Indirectly perhaps. Braavos was founded by Jogos Nhai slaves, so we like to keep an eye on our kin in the east. With Ibben close by it's often easy enough to make a small trip a little further to exchange some goods, and occasionally some things from Nefer as well."
"I'll probably need to learn some Ibbenese or Jogos Nhai then."
"I wouldn't, N'Ghai is supposed to be filled with necromancers."
"Doesn't that just make it better? What could be more enticing than goods from distant lands, straight from the hands of the necromancers their undead hoards?"
"Leave market talk for the markets. We deal with the realities of money, not the falsehoods of advertising."
Can choose more than one
[x] Wearing dead faces, using light and shadow? I've got to learn more about this
[x] Figure out who is rich in town, where their wealth is hidden, so you can take it for yourself.
[x] Look for some likely way to get a ship and crew. Taking a body might work, but how would you keep the crew's loyalty if they learned you were an abomination?
[x] If travel is more important than trade, then plan out how to get to where you want to go and learn the languages you can for the voyage.
[x] Ships break, and time means food. Plan out what runes it would take to make a ships' spine flexible, to make the ship faster and have better balance.
[x] Other stuff I didn't think of.
