Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader
Chapter 25: The Richest Man Alive

Chapter 25: The Richest Man Alive

Milo made his choice before he’d finished thinking it through, which was, he was beginning to suspect, the only way real choices ever actually got made.

He didn’t run. He didn’t wait for the shadow at the tannery wall to decide what it wanted from him. He turned and closed the distance himself, fast, low, every scrap of DEX his borrowed body owned thrown into closing a gap most people would have spent trying to widen — because a man who was going to die tonight regardless had exactly nothing left to lose by choosing when the fighting started.

It didn’t help. The figure that met him out of the dark moved like water finding the one gap in a dam, and Milo’s sword was on the ground and a knife was at his throat before he’d finished the thought that had sent him charging in the first place.

"Easy," the voice said, close to his ear, unbothered, the specific calm of someone who had done this exact thing to considerably more dangerous men than Milo currently was. "Easy. If I wanted you dead, you already would be."

Milo strained against the arm locking his own behind his back, found nothing to work with, and forced himself to stop wasting the effort. His pulse was doing something violent and unhelpful. The blade at his throat hadn’t moved, hadn’t pressed, was simply there, patient, the way a held door is patient right before it swings.

"Then what do you want," Milo managed.

The knife didn’t move. The grip didn’t loosen. But something in the voice, when it answered, shifted — not softer, exactly, but closer to genuinely curious than it had any right to sound given the current arrangement of their bodies.

"Your will is true," the voice said. "A brave man, choosing that boy’s life over his own. Or a stupid one. Possibly both — bravery and stupidity have always shared a house, in my experience, and it’s rarely worth the effort sorting out which room a man’s actually standing in." A pause, thoughtful, unhurried. "Sadly weak, though. That part’s not a compliment. You’d have died in about four more seconds if I’d let this go on." Another pause, longer. "My friend would like to see you."

Friend. Not His Majesty. Not the King. Milo turned that word over as carefully as his current circumstances allowed, and the longer he turned it, the less sense the whole encounter made. The King didn’t need spies. The King owned an army built from other men’s stolen will and could unmake anyone in this city with a look he didn’t even have to aim carefully — sending someone to watch, to test, to report, was a redundancy so unnecessary it barely qualified as strategy. Whoever had sent this man wasn’t the King. And whoever it actually was, Milo realized, testing the thought the way you test ice before trusting your full weight to it, didn’t feel like they wanted him dead either.

"I don’t suppose I have much say in this," Milo said.

"You have exactly as much say as you did four seconds ago," the voice said, and there was something almost like humor in it now. "None. But you’ll want to come anyway. I promise you that much."

They covered his head before they moved him, which told Milo more about his captor’s caution than his cruelty, and the walk that followed was long enough, and turned enough corners, that by the time the cloth finally came off he had no honest idea which direction the palace even lay in anymore.

The room they’d brought him to was warm. Genuinely warm, firelight and thick carpet and the specific, expensive comfort of a space built by someone who had never once had to think twice about the cost of comfort — and the man waiting in it rose from his chair the instant the cloth came away, both hands open, empty, entirely unlike the last several hours of Milo’s life.

"You must be exhausted," the man said, and the warmth in his voice matched the room so precisely it took Milo a full second to remember he’d been dragged here at knifepoint less than an hour ago. "Sit. Please. Whatever you’re bracing for, it isn’t happening in this room."

He was not young. Silver ran heavy through dark hair, and his hands, when he gestured toward the chair opposite his own, carried the specific calluses of a man who had built something real once, a long time ago, before other people started building it for him. His clothes were fine without being loud about it — the particular restraint of wealth old enough to stop needing to prove itself.

"Osmund Thale," he said, settling back into his own chair once Milo had, warily, taken the one offered. "Though I imagine you’ve heard the title more than the name. The richest man currently breathing, if the rumors are to be trusted, which they mostly are, because I make a point of trusting good rumors about myself and correcting the bad ones personally."

"You hate the King," Milo said, because pretending otherwise after a knife and a blindfold felt like an insult to both their intelligence.

Something crossed Osmund’s face — quick, unguarded, gone before it fully finished arriving. "I do," he said simply. "He knows I do. That’s rather the interesting part. He’s known for years, and he’s never once used that lovely, terrible Talent of his to make me stop. Do you know why?"

"I’d guess amusement," Milo said. "He struck me as a man who enjoys knowing things other people think are secrets."

Osmund laughed, short and genuinely surprised. "Close. It’s simpler than that, and considerably more insulting. I make this kingdom richer every single year, Loof. I have for two decades. His greed doesn’t have an edge to it — it just wants, endlessly, and I happen to be extremely good at feeding that want. He doesn’t need my loyalty. He only needs my usefulness, and he’s arranged, through means I won’t insult either of us by explaining in detail, that my usefulness continues exactly on schedule regardless of what I privately feel about the man collecting it." He spread his hands, wry, tired in a way that went deeper than one evening’s tiredness. "I am, in every sense that matters to him, a very well-maintained tool that happens to hate its owner. He finds that funny. I’ve stopped finding it anything at all."

"How," Osmund asked, after a silence long enough to have grown its own weather, "did you break his order tonight. I’ve watched men try to resist a Claim before. It doesn’t work the way you made it look work. It doesn’t bend. It certainly doesn’t bend for something as small as mercy toward a street child."

Milo felt the question land exactly where he’d known it eventually would, and reached for an answer vague enough to be true without being useful to anyone standing on the other side of it.

"I’m wired differently," he said. "I don’t fully understand it myself. I doubt I could repeat it on command."

It wasn’t nothing, that answer, and it wasn’t the truth either, and some quiet, unexamined corner of Milo’s borrowed memory stirred at the shape of the lie without quite showing him what it was stirring about — a fragment, formless, insistent, the specific texture of a secret the story itself hadn’t decided to hand him yet. Nobody knew, the fragment seemed to say, patient, waiting for its proper Chapter. Not until he was forced to fight for real. Milo didn’t know what that meant. He suspected, uncomfortably, that the real Loof’s real Talent had never once been tested in front of anyone who mattered, that whatever waited underneath thirty-one tally marks and a habit of lying his way out of trouble was considerably larger than "sadly weak" — and that none of it currently belonged to him, because he’d walked in wearing this body without ever once picking up whatever gift had come bundled with it.

It didn’t matter tonight. He didn’t have it. Osmund didn’t need to know that either.

"Wired differently," Osmund repeated, testing the phrase, clearly unconvinced and, more interestingly, clearly deciding not to push. "Fair enough. Everyone in this story is entitled to at least one secret they don’t hand over on the first evening."

"You should understand what you’ve actually stepped into," Osmund said, later, once wine had appeared and the fire had burned low enough to need tending and neither of them had moved to tend it. "This isn’t the first attempt on that man’s crown. There was another, years back — a dozen good men, angry for a dozen good reasons, who believed freedom and knowledge were worth dying for and decided dying was an acceptable price to test that belief." His voice had gone somewhere flatter, older. "They failed. Every one of them. It wasn’t a close thing, or a brave thing that simply came up short. It was a slaughter dressed up afterward as a lesson, and the lesson worked exactly as well as he intended it to."

"You were one of them," Milo said. Not a question.

"I funded them," Osmund said. "I didn’t fight. I’ve had two decades to decide whether that makes me a coward or simply the only one who survived to keep trying, and I still don’t have an answer I fully believe."

Milo sat with that a long moment, and then said the thing he’d been turning over since a market square first told him how this story ended.

"If the King dies," he said, "I have a theory the story ends with him. Not just his reign. The story itself — the shape of it, the reason I’m even standing here instead of somewhere I’m actually needed. I don’t fully understand the mechanism. I understand enough to believe it’s worth testing."

Osmund’s eyes sharpened, old grief giving way, just slightly, to something that hadn’t visited his face in what looked like a very long time.

"Then we have a great deal to discuss," he said, "and very little of it, I suspect, is going to be simple." He set his cup down, and something in his posture shifted — the wine, or the hour, or simply the specific loneliness of a man who had carried the same story alone for twenty years finally finding someone willing to hear the rest of it. "You’ll want to know how I ended up the kind of man who funds rebellions and survives them. It isn’t a short story. It isn’t a happy one either, if I’m honest, and I find I’d very much like to be honest with you, Loof, if you’ll let me."

Milo already knew it. The knowledge had arrived the same way it always arrived in this place — whole, uninvited, sitting quietly behind his eyes since the moment Osmund’s name had first been spoken in that warm, firelit room. He knew the dead wife. He knew the son who hadn’t survived what the King’s collectors had done to their house the year the taxes tripled. He knew, down to the specific bitter shape of it, exactly why a man built this rich had never once used that fortune to simply leave.

He said none of it. Saying it now would have felt, somehow, like the cruelest thing he’d done all night — worse than the lie to the King, worse than the fear he’d put in Wick’s eyes before taking it back. Osmund wanted to be the one who told this story. Milo understood, watching the old grief resettle itself across the man’s face, that letting him do it was the only gift currently in his power to give.

"I’m listening," Milo said, and meant it, and waited for a story he already knew every word of.