"I looked up all the most impressive women CEOs in Anitam and got a meeting with her. Planning to marry her, I figured marrying the most impressive woman CEO in Anitam was a good idea."

" - that's brilliant."

"Thank you! What'd you do."

"I visited her store - I thought she was a man - because I was curious about its pricing structure."

"Still better than Aaron's, at least it involved sorting for the thing that she is."

"What's his?"

"He was running a currency exchange, she came by it."

"That's not that different. I'm assuming he didn't have any authority to just show up in peoples' shops asking questions anyway."

"Is that a normal thing for royalty to do in your country?"

"Yes. I mean, I have better questions than most people but it's a pretty core job responsibility."

"He's also a cleric," Ismat says, "not just a random prince, I don't think Masaharta inspects jewelry stores because they're having suspicious sales."

"If he did then he'd probably be a cleric, sooner or later. We run about one in five, compared to the general population's one in a hundred."

"How does one become a cleric?"

"Abadar chooses them."

"Abadar is -"

"God of cities and law and merchants and wealth. Osirion's patron."

" - cool. How does he pick clerics?"

"Gives you magic powers."

"And he likes... inspecting suspicious sales?"

"The most actionable way of expressing devotion to him is trying to create a lot of value."

"How is a sale suspicious?"

"If you make a mistake making a magic item you can wind up with a cursed item. It looked like I might be trying to move some of those. I was trying to get buzz, so that didn't seem like a reason not to discount, since no one was going to find any curses in my shop."

"And your royalty personally goes around enforcing this?"

"In my capacity as a cleric I do the work of the church which includes investigating fraud and so on."

"Do you have a caste system -"