"In resurrections and in other added costs to the state, I believe we're looking at something in the neighborhood of two hundred forty thousand gold." This is a terrifying amount of money to have lost overnight, but Ishani is now more or less used to numbers going that high. "The total loss in lives and property damage is of course much more than that, but in terms of what I understand the crown to be likely to pay for."

"That's delegates, families, key personnel, relief efforts, and property damage that's unambiguously our problem, like the convention hall? How much, out of curiosity, if we raised all the victims, but not the rioters?"

"Probably at least twice as much, but I don't think we have the resources to distinguish. Frederick, did you -"

"Nah. We cut the poor bastards down off the lampposts while it was still raining, after we stopped finding injured. Even if we only count them as victims and ignore anything more ambiguous, you can't keep records under those conditions. Or if you can, I sure didn't, that's my bad. I couldn't pick them out again."

"You are one of the very few people who covered yourself in glory last night. What's done is done. I don't think it's a reasonable use of money, anyway." It hurts, but when her own people were burnt by devils directly, she only got about a fifth of them back.

"Which brings us to how we're going to pay for any of this. The crown needs two and a half hundred thousand, where are we gonna find it."

"Auction the Sunday resurrections? It'll take you... half a year, that way."

"We already do that. Have been since we ran out of obviously useful nobles to resurrect. But we sell them in Westcrown, and we can discontinue that and sell them somewhere that pays gold instead."

"You want to lower the supply of resurrections when demand will be highest?"

"It's not real money! We can't buy things with it!"

"It's money, it just only buys one thing. More souls out of hell for each day of resurrections than went there last night in the rioting, which I think we all value quite a bit." Ishani is the Lawful Good kind of Abadaran.

Rasima is, in fact, also Good. It's virtually impossible to work directly with Naima every day and not end up there. This doesn't mean that she can't be exasperated. "It is not going to help us fix Westcrown, or pay for anything else we allocated money for. Frankly I'm concerned about the economic effects of pulling so much paper out of the economy without replacing it with gold, but that's a conversation for another time. We don't have resurrections going spare."

"There is Sunday itself. Two thousand an hour in Tian Xia, if we select locations well."

"I think that's optimistic for one-off locations, and you're flatly not allowed to commit your Sundays to a route. If it isn't, we should be moving more of our one-off days out of Cheliax and to Tian Xia. And Vudra, Vudra still has lots of densely populated areas we haven't touched at all."

"Leaving more Chelish farmers to die and be damned for good, instead of turning into elves."

"Look, you're very good at spinning gold out of air, but if you could do any more of it costlessly, you'd already be doing it."

"Could you schedule more one-off locations instead of of going to the hospital every day? If you put all the time towards tapping, you could make it up in two and a half months. I assume you don't want to leave it completely unsupervised -"

"It's not unsupervised."

" - sorry, are we talking about cutting the most important research project anyone in the world is doing right now down from two hours a day of the head researcher's time to none?"

"I'm sorry, I understand that it's important. But it's not time-sensitive, it doesn't make money, and there are no other significant blocks of time in the schedule."

"The fuck do you mean it's not time sensitive? Did people stop dying of anything but violence while I wasn't looking?"

Hamideh stands up and begins silently calculating something on the chalkboard at the far end of the room.

"Look, we all understand how important it is to get the remedies working." Actually she's not remotely confident that Novella does, but that can hardly be helped. Rasima and the apprentices were brought on board when remedies were the only interesting ability Naima had, and have been working with them for four years now, hoping the whole time that the skill can be learned. Novella Marino was hired by an archmage attempting to prop up the economy of an entire country with the work of her own hands.

"The fact remains that they don't make money for us, they will never make money for us, and we don't know how long it will take for either you or Kassi Aziril to crack more than a handful of individual possible treatments, to say nothing of the rest of the students."

"They won't make money because Ishani hasn't figured out a scheme that captures a half a percent of the value they'll create, not because the value isn't there."

"And you can be very smug about them when you face the Judge, if they ever actually pan out, but they're not going to fix our problem."

"We could axe the schools on the Junira."