"Fiducia?", Mar asks, fortunately having learned the proper title in the first city, and having observed that Abadarans prefer more directness, "I've come to the city to represent Abadar at the Constitutional Convention. Where should I find lodging? And receive tutoring, I'm very new to Abadar."

"There is space in the rectory. Have you read the holy books yet, Fiducia...?"

"Rossell. I will take the space if the price is reasonable. I have the Order of Numbers and some excerpts from the Manual, but I was barely in the city to begin it when I received the request for native-born chosen to come to the capital."

"Well, welcome to Westcrown, Fiducia Rossell; I'm Cicerone Hikmat - Osirians use a different title, though while I'm here I'll answer to Fiducia too. Once we've verified you by either you or one of us doing a Truthtelling you can have a room in the rectory for two silver a week."

"Nice to meet you, Cicerone Hikmat. Is there, um, anything nearby which would get other use from the spell?" Wasting valuable things seems like something Abadar is against. And it might be a test for that.

"Not right now, but we usually sell more in a day than we have so far, so if you wait I'd expect you to be able to sell one if you have it prepared. If you don't then at the end of business hours I can cast a spare on you if there is one left."

"That sounds good. I'm happy to, I've prepared one every day I'm passing through a town, but it seems wasteful to use one without actually using what it creates. Um, I would like to get tutoring in the meantime, should I ask you or someone else?"

"I'm available until someone pays for my time!" says Hikmat cheerfully. "Where do you want to start?"

"Well, I know Abadar runs insurance and banks, and likes business and trade, but I don't really understand Him or why He chose me. So maybe what you think is most important to Abadar, or which differences from Mammon are most important, or maybe I should tell you about how I was chosen."

"- well, Mammonites are anticompetitive," says Hikmat. "Which I suppose must sound like an awfully anticompetitive thing for an Abadaran to say, now that I think of it, but I do think it's an important difference... Competition is the yoke that harnesses avarice. By itself greed is just one of the many human impulses, nothing special about it, but if you put it in the right environment of Law and other contributors to the economy, so that each business has to fight - not with blades but with quality and innovation and cost-cutting - then it drives civilization."

"Hmmm. So, if Mammon started offerring insurance... well, no, he's Evil and would trick people. If Irori did, then Abadar would be in favor?"

"You know, I have no idea how Irorite insurance would tend to work out! But assuming it was an honest product, yes, absolutely. And... Osirion is Abadar's country, but we have plenty of other temples, too, and if we want to charge and the Sarenrites want to give things away, well, we'd better make our services better in some respect by enough to capture the customers who have money, hadn't we."

"I don't think they would, Irorites, but it seemed likelier than Iomedae or Erastil. Erastil would call it city nonsense and Iomedae is too busy fighting wars. Irori would just say that if you didn't buy it or bought too much then it's your own fault for being foolish."

"How does Abadar make his temples better than Sarenrae's?"

"It depends on the temple! Usually we would have refreshments, and someone circulating among anyone waiting for channels to see if they can be made more comfortable, and one place offered Detect Poison at no extra charge for anyone a channel didn't seem to help so they'd have more information about what might be wrong, and of course there's always the fact that some people would rather hear Abadarans preaching than Sarenrites and might pay to be in earshot of the one rather than the other."

"I can understand that, certainly. We'd listen to archdevil priests instead of the Asmodeans just for getting us out of the main sermon and a little variety, and I'd have paid coppers to do it, surely. ...What does Abadar think of guilds?"

"It depends on the guild. The older and more entrenched a guild is, the worse it tends to be, so I'm personally suspicious of the entire enterprise, but it's not really clear when something turns from something that's just like any other voluntary exchange of goods and services within a group of people to something that's suppressing market clearance."

"Hmm. Then I'm more confused about Him picking me, because I definitely made the guild in Roda de Mar - the Weaver's Guild, the main one - stronger."

"Then I'd like to hear all about it to learn more about what He thinks is the right amount of guild power!"

"Well, we're weavers, of course, the Rossells and the other families. So the archmage ruined us and we were very worried we'd starve soon. But I had the idea to ask the local Countess what she'd want, that visibly couldn't be made with the damned spell, which is plaids, mostly, and we started making that, for her and her neighbors. But I realized we couldn't make enough for the duchy, and talked to Grandfather about selling the secret of what we were doing to the other families, and now the Rossells get a tenth of their profits for three years and they're making plaid and I'm a Fiducia."

"- so that's a very restrained amount of guild power! You came up with an innovation and you are taking a small cut of the surplus it will generate for only a short amount of time. That doesn't stop new weavers from entering the market or try to directly control the prices at all."

"Well, yes, but no one else will be competing for a year and otherwise the guild would have collapsed, right, and just been a family business and four families of paupers and laborers."

"The thing I think of when I think of guilds gone bad is guilds that won't let anyone operate in their field and territory at all, ever, without paying dues and agreeing never to undercut the guild's set sale price. It sounds like if someone shows up in your duchy, notices the countess is wearing plaid, and starts weaving plaids too, they don't have any new problems that they wouldn't have had doing the same thing before you had your idea, because they weren't one of the families who agreed to buy your information. Right? And you're taking a cut of profits, not a fixed due, and you're not setting a price - so if someone comes up with a way to make plaid twice as fast or gets a great deal on dye, you'll make more and so will they, while the Countess gets her plaids cheaper."

"Probably. I think they will fix a price, probably, they did before for normal cloth until it was triple or more the price coming upriver. But it wasn't in my deal. I suppose if I make it home I'll have to tell them Abadar frowns on it and hopefully explain why."

"Oh, yes, price-fixing is bad. In either direction. Do you have that intuited or should I go on about it a bit?"

"Um. Go on a bit, please."

"So, a lot of people really hate what they call 'price-gouging', when there's a shortage of something and the price of it shoots up. And of course it mostly looks, to a typical consumer, like it's just a seller taking advantage; the buyer imagines that they 'already had' the right to buy something at the price it was yesterday, and not having it any more feels like a loss. They did have that right - yesterday. Once it's scarce the price changes. But let's suppose something goes wrong with the Sphinx River - suppose it flows backwards for a day or something in some kind of magical disaster, and it's all salt close to the coast till the situation's resolved. Because and only because you can then charge more for water, some clerics will trek downriver - well, in this situation I suppose it's upriver - even if it's dangerous to get on a boat, even if they were busy, even if they were retired, because they want the money. So then Sothis has more clerics who can make water than it had yesterday, precisely when it needs them. The river returns to normal, they all go home, no one's died of thirst and everyone is paid for their trip and their orisons.

"And suppose your guild sets a minimum price - so much for a yard of plaid, say. And then you get a great deal on dye. You take it, obviously, you'll save money that way and have a little extra, but the customers never see a speck of it. You can't outcompete your guildmate, and you can't say 'today we have a special on anything in blue'. And meanwhile, people buy less fabric, because it's expensive. Could you be selling twice as much at three quarters the price if you hired more people, making more money and giving everyone more clothes? You'll never find out! There could be someone with their nose pressed up against your shop window thinking 'if only some of it was a little cheaper I could justify one square of it for a scarf' and their favorite color could be blue and you'll never know!"

"Are there reasons to raise prices Abadar does frown on? If you're... acting alone, I guess, and not working together."

"- well, there are times when it would be a foolish business decision for any number of reasons and make you less money. And I think sometimes people hoard their talents because they haven't really thought about what they would want for them, rather than because there really isn't anything. But otherwise no, I don't think so."

"Huh," says Mar, who has now disproven one of the few things she knew about Abadar. She may have to use her Truthtelling on Cicerone Hikmat later just to be sure. "How about - charging one price to some people and a different price to other people?"

"I think it's best if you have some kind of reason, but the reason can be that you don't like those other people and want to be paid more to put up with them. The more graceful way is to have a basic version of the thing and then a little extra service you charge kind of a lot for on top, and then people can self-sort, whether they'd like to be the some people or the other people - like if you got a deal on blue dye, someone who preferred red could choose to pay more to get red, but you can also do this even if the dyes cost you the same amount, so you don't alienate those with tight budgets while you get some extra money from anyone of means who doesn't care for blue."

"Huh," she says again, and for the same reason, though really if she was wrong about one she's not surprised about the other.

"Not what you were expecting?"

"No. I thought... that the things guilds do, or people the count has given a right of monopoly, or Mammon, are about making people pay them more than their goods are really worth, and that's un-neighborly at best, and usually bad or outright Evil, and Abadar would be against it. But it sounds like He doesn't mind if I try to get more than it's worth, as long as I don't do things to... I don't know, I think I might be able to guess which other things would be wrong in Abadar's eyes but I don't think I can say why."

"There's not a real amount things are worth. That's the miracle of trade. You trade because the things you're trading are worth different amounts to the parties and the amounts are both real and every time it happens - for that reason and not some other reason - the world is richer."

"Hmm. I think that will seem very profound and important when I understand it."

"There's more about that in the Manual of City-Building, it's a big part of why He likes cities."

"Because... more trade happens? Or some other thing. Or both."

"Because more trade happens and it can be more specialized. In a little village a single farm family grows most of what they eat, makes most of what they wear, mostly has to entertain themselves with whatever occurs to them on their own. They get a little good at all those things. In a city it makes more sense to get very good at something more specific."

"I think I see. If you took the Weaver's Guild and the Coopers and the river-captains and made us all train to do all of them we'd be worse, not just at our specialties but all worse. There'd be less cloth and worse - well, less nice cloth now - and less barrels or worse ones, and the riverboats would move slower and crash more. Is that about right?"

"Yes! All that and you'd spend more time at work. In Axis - well, people have fewer needs, but they still want things, and they have them for very little work indeed."

"Axis sounds nice." She hopes she makes it there. "I think I am still confused about the part where everyone has a different worth for things. How can you tell? How can they tell?"

"People do it in different ways, and not always very well. But they do it every time they buy something, for better or for worse - what does it feel like when you decide whether to buy this or that vegetable in the market?"

"...I would usually think about whether they look like good condition, and how much the merchant tries to cheat people, and whether the price is different from usual, and why. But I guess I also think about how much I like them and how far my silver will stretch for different foods."

"Right - you assess how valuable the vegetable is, both in general and for you, and you assess how valuable your money is, again both to the seller and to you - a low price means they are treating your money as that little bit more valuable, if less of it will go far enough to make it worth their while. You pick a good tradeoff, with good risks - the merchant maybe being a cheat is about that."

Good risks? No, that means 'risks good by being small', that's straightforward enough. Abadar doesn't dislike it enough to get rid of all risks, or at least not for mortals since nobody can. And they're valuing the money, which is why it's important for it to be something valuable like gold and silver, not paper.

"Hmm," she says, but it doesn't sound nearly as confused this time, "Are there passages of the Manual or the Order I should read about that? I didn't recognize anything like it on my first read of the Order but it's, uh..." Nearly impenetrable and she got considered for wizard school.

"Yes, let me find you some page numbers..." She goes and unlocks the books from the display case.

Both the copies of Manual of City-Building she's seen are beautiful books. The gold on this one's a little less tacky than the other one she saw, but well chosen.

(When she was thinking of designs to please the Countess and other nobles, she mainly turned her thoughts to things that the family had made for themselves and decorated the house with. To decorate the most important object of your work and keep it in pride of place in the temple is one of the few things about Abadar's Church that actually feels like home.)

Presently Hikmat's got each one open to relevant pages for her.

"Thank you, Cicerone, I'll read these for a while. Um, are there commentaries on the Order of Numbers? I found it... not very mortal? And I wouldn't think I'm the first."

"There are, I brought one of my favorites, and I'll lend it to you at a bond of ten silver."

It seems like the right thing to do is to think about this for a few moments before she accepts, so Mar does, but it's a good deal.

"That seems fair," she says, and gets out her silver to trade for it. She was already going to be careful with the other books, it's not like she's going to slip up.

Here's some Osirian prince's commentary on the Order of Numbers! It's almost as long as the holy book itself.

This is intimidating! But looking at pieces of it, it's less intimidating than the Order, it's abstract language but it's a fancy academic language rather than can-Abadar-actually-speak-Taldane language.

She'll find somewhere to sit and read about value and trade for a while. Come back for more lessons later.