Jaume's father pays Jaume's mother an allowance, once a month.  She goes to the bank, bringing the children if the twelfth of the month happens to fall on a weekend and they aren't in school, and collects her money from the Mammonites who are holding it, and she spends it on food and clothing and rent for her and Jaume and his sister Genoveva.  Jaume goes an embarrassingly long time imagining that every other seldom-to-never-seen father does the same.  If they want their children kept presentable and their wives/mistresses/girlfriends/undefined feminine affiliates to be willing to see them whenever they blow into town or want a warm bed, then of course they have to fund the project in a way at least loosely like this.  The subtleties of the various statuses of feminine affiliate elude him but this basic feature must persist so long as the man is alive and hasn't declared feminine-affiliate-bankruptcy.

At any rate, at least in his family, this blessedly rational arrangement persists, until one day Mother goes to the bank and they tell her there are to be no withdrawals.  They will not explain.  They will not tell her if there will be withdrawals on the thirteenth.  They are letting some old man withdraw his money right then and there.  They throw her out, and Jaume with her (his sister is spending the day with her friends at the beach).

Mother and Father have a horrendous fight about it, because apparently she though it was his fault, and she resents enormously that after such a slight he'd presume to turn up on her doorstep and want a kiss; but Father blames the bank.  Jaume catches only the edge of the shouting, as he is not allowed to eavesdrop and his bedroom is in the cellar (he likes it down there, especially compared to sharing with his sister) where he can't much hear.  The gist he comes away with is that the bankers were having some kind of problem and decided to cover for their problem by not giving people their money, if they thought those people might not be important enough to make a big fuss.

Corentyn has a bank of Abadar.  It is not, mostly, used by ordinary burghers who are trying to fund their various mistresses in a low-friction way.  It's there as a clearinghouse for the ships' cargo, an insurer and loan officer for business and infrastructure.  But Jaume's father manages to open an account there and give them instructions for letting Mother draw it down as she's accustomed.  He says they will not have this problem at the Bank of Abadar.

Jaume has learned, in school, that Mammon is an archdevil and like all devils is Lawful Evil.  Law is about being fair, like how everyone in class has the same chance to study and finish their assignments and if someone is the worst at math that is something they had just as much opportunity as Jaume to address.  It's about not stealing things, for example in contrast to how pirates will attack a ship out of the blue and loot its hold for themselves.  It's about following instructions, like the instructions his teacher or mother or priest give.

Jaume derives from his experiences that Pharasma's standards for Law are laughably permissive and actually Mammon is merely """"Lawful"""" Evil.  Because not giving Mother the money that Father left in the bank for her with explicit instructions, but letting parabarons and clerics and the mayor's lackeys make any withdrawals they cared to, and holding on to the money themselves because they wanted money today more than tomorrow and didn't care that Mother also wanted it today and not tomorrow - that's not how it ought to be done.

The Bank of Abadar in Corentyn is not a temple.  Primary worship of another god besides Asmodeus is a serious crime, and if Jaume had in his elementary school days been a bit unbalancedly fond of Mammon, at least Mammon may be presumed to pay his taxes on time and in full to Asmodeus so the accounts will always reflect the matter correctly.  (Mammon may be faux Lawful but where Law does not hold, force may, and force Asmodeus surely has.)  Having no intention of inspiring any loyal Chelish citizens to lawlessness, the clerics of Abadar who operate the bank do banking first and foremost, and sell their spells as an afterthought, and stop there.  Sometimes there are Lawful Neutral ones freshly rotated in from abroad who haven't caught Evil yet and they sell channels, in a great big round room built for purpose.  But they don't have services, they don't do spiritual counseling, they don't talk up Axis or lecture people about not stifling competition or otherwise provoke the wrath of the (The) church or the state.  The selling spells you certainly need cleric circles to do, but you'd think that anyone who just cared about doing Law correctly rather than merely up to Pharasma's lax standard would be able to do the banking part without a speck of magic, and yet they - can't?  Somehow?  It's weird, frankly.

Jaume is identified as a potential cleric when everyone's age increments, in early Abadius, and his becomes sixteen.  He still has some school left to go, but now instead of a bookkeeping apprenticeship at his father's firm he's earmarked for the priesthood as soon as the term ends.

The money's good.  Clerics get to sell their spells; the Abadarans do it but so too do the Asmodeans, who also get tithes.

The robes command respect, or at least fear; if Jaume can't swing it personally, the office can cover him.

The seminary's interior workings are mysterious but most young people who go in do come out again, and empowered.

The Law is fake.

Oh, sure, Mammon is a separate entity from Asmodeus, but Asmodeus could have told Him to do it properly, to renounce those unfair thieving scofflaws and kick them to the curb.  Sure, the Watch didn't care and the Queen didn't care so in a sense it was "legal" to be paid to do a job and then simply not do it.  But that's Pharasma's watered-down pathetic imitation straw-effigy of Law.

Now, the trouble is: most young people who go in do come out again, and empowered.  And Jaume knows that they do not all go in happily, praising the Lord their God, the Prince of Devils, eager to be His.  Sometimes there is some considerable transformation going on in there.  It could be torture, that would hardly be out of distribution for what to expect from the church.  It could be drugs.  It could be enchantments, clerics get magic and have no barrier to hiring wizards if it's not the right kind of magic.  It could be summoned devils with tongues so forked that no one can hear them and master his own will.  It could be something Jaume's never heard of.  He cannot guarantee that it would be something he could withstand.  They do not, he expects, let you say, "having been enrolled, I am now dropping out immediately, and accept as my punishment for wasting your time that dreadful flogging you reserve for your failed students" - he thinks that whatever they do, they try at it for a good long while, and they might know more than he does about whether he's likely to fold.

But he doesn't want to fold.  He doesn't want to be a paper-thin mockery of Law, real Law, holy beautiful Law.  He doesn't know if you can do Asmodeanism and also do things right.  Of course he's going to Hell anyway, everyone in Cheliax is, the soul of the entire land from border to coast is bought and paid for and now the Evil's in the drinking water - he doesn't think he can Law his way out of Hell, not with Pharasma at the reins - but does he have to go to Hell and also be a cheat?  Does he have to go to Hell and also be a liar?  Because the priests, they... facing down the possibility of donning their uniform he's remembering, now, every priest he's ever seen in his life, they take things by threat instead of buying them and they imply and prevaricate their way through every conversation and maybe they can't make Jaume just like them but maybe they can if he lets them try -

He has until end of term; they don't do it Sunday-school style, here, and they don't pull children out of class early.

He goes to the bank.

It's not a temple.  There is no pastoral care to be had there.  There are no copies of Abadar's books on display where he could read them for comfort or guidance.  There is just the bank, and its commitment, its shining raw awe-inspiring commitment to the Law that inheres in the world somewhere between arithmetic and gravity.  There's a waiting room, and no one in it right now.  Jaume sits down in one of the nice leather armchairs that they can afford for their waiting room because absolutely anyone with sense would a thousand times rather deal with an Abadaran than with any other man in all of Cheliax and for this achievement of predictable beneficence they reap the cost of nice leather armchairs.

Jaume is not actually a prayerful sort by nature.  He mouths along whatever they're doing in church out of duty.  He doesn't know how you address a god if you haven't already half-memorized the entire hymnbook for Him.  He sits there in a sort of mental silence, trying to figure it out.  There are probably Abadaran hymns but he doesn't know them.  It's not a temple.

What does Abadar want out of having a cleric at all?  Could he just sit on his pile of riches in Axis and not worry about having any clergy, would that be just as good?  Clearly not, because right over there behind that counter there is a cleric, of Abadar, who makes money off spells from Abadar and more money still off the endorsement of Abadar.  What is she doing that earns her that?  She is at this moment - writing something in a giant book.  Probably a credit or a debit.  Bookkeepers like he had last week meant to become do that all the time; do they please Abadar too, if not quite as much as bankers do?  Maybe?  But He doesn't tend to choose random bookkeepers, or at least not here He doesn't - the Abadaran clerics here are all of them foreign-born, with accents from Absalom and Katapesh, how did they do it?  Could he ask?  He has stupidly not brought any money with him to the bank and they are so, so rigid, about charging for their time, on any question not directly relevant to their services, and he's not even sure they'd take his money if he asked them how to glorify Abadar.  They aren't tending to a congregation here.  It's not a temple.

It's not a temple because it wouldn't be safe for people to visit it, if it were a temple.  Its customers would start being arrested left and right for primary worship.  The foreign Abadarans would be extradited or hanged for their destabilizing influence.  A mere bank can squeeze by, essential, inoffensive, siphoning off no Asmodeans from their appointed worship.

Jaume shouldn't be here at all.  He'll jeopardize the entire institution if he starts begging the clerics to help him with making it impossible that he be Asmodeus's.

Heart in his throat, he gets up and leaves the bank.  He goes for a walk through the market.  He tries, without any help at all, to pray.

It would be fine if they killed me, he tells Abadar.  It would be fine if they Maledicted me to make sure I could never see Axis.  I don't think I can get there anyway.  It's in the water.  It would be fine if they tortured me to death and then Maledicted me and then turned me into a paving stone forever.  It's just that it's not fine if I'm a thief and I don't know what they do in there to make people that way.  But I didn't mean to mess up the bank, that was dumb of me to go there.  I don't want to mess up Your bank.

Can You do it without it messing up the bank?  It's okay if it messes up me - I mean, as long as there's enough of me left I can pay You back, obviously if my entire life isn't good enough to be worth risking it because the risk is big or my life would be very short I don't mean to ask You to -

A great warm weight settles over Jaume's shoulders like a cloak against the winter.

He blinks spots from his eyes, then tears.  He's going to live, because if he were about to be executed as soon as he reported to the church potential-cleric-scout he'd be far too expensive amortized over his expected lifespan.  He's going to live and go do accounting at the bank.  He's going to write a million perfect numbers in that gigantic book and he never ever ever has to do anything wrong.