Chapter 188 The Forged Bills
POV: Callum | The Rookeries, then emergency meeting
The counterfeiting is discovered on a Tuesday, which is the day Tom's financial contact in the supernatural banking network calls in a voice that has the specific flat quality of someone who has been calm about an emergency for as long as they can maintain it and has reached the limit.
Dragon scrip is the backbone of the supernatural economy. It has been for two hundred years, which is how long the dragons have been issuing it, and its value is guaranteed by the dragons' hoards, which are real and large and not subject to the fluctuations that affect human currency because nobody who understands what a dragon is willing to do to protect its hoard is going to speculate against it. The scrip works because the guarantee is real and everyone knows the guarantee is real.
Someone in the Hermetic Order has been counterfeiting it.
The forgeries are sophisticated enough that they have been circulating for four months without detection, which means a substantial volume of fake scrip has moved through the supernatural economy, which means transactions that appeared legitimate are not legitimate, which means the network of trust that the entire economy runs on has been quietly compromised while everyone was watching other things.
When the news breaks it breaks everywhere simultaneously because that is how financial confidence works, which is to say it works perfectly until the moment it stops working and then it stops completely and all at once.
I spend the morning watching what this looks like in practice. The businesses that received Vermithrax's letters yesterday are now sitting on scrip they cannot spend because the receiving parties will not accept it pending verification that nobody has worked out how to conduct yet. The packless community runs on scrip because scrip is what they have access to, the supernatural economy being their economy in ways that the human economy is not. The shelter's accounts are frozen. Isla calls me at midday to tell me that three suppliers have cancelled deliveries because they will not accept payment until the situation is clarified.
The dragons are furious. This is a useful phrase but it does not capture the specific quality of dragon fury, which is geological rather than emotional, the fury of something that has existed for a very long time and has developed an understanding of insult that operates on timescales humans do not naturally inhabit. Vermithrax's intermediary delivers a message to every supernatural community leader in London within six hours of the news breaking: The scrip will be verified and reissued. The counterfeiters will be identified. The consequences will be appropriate to the insult.
What the message means in practical terms is that the economy is paralyzed for an indeterminate period while the dragons audit their own currency, and in the meantime everyone who depends on the supernatural economy is managing without it.
What it also means, and this is the thing that takes me until evening to understand fully, is that the dragons need help identifying the counterfeiters, because the Hermetic Order's forgery operation is a supernatural crime requiring supernatural community cooperation to investigate, and the dragons do not have the community networks that the investigation requires.
I am sitting in an emergency meeting at the Feral Den with Alteroni's representative, two fae community leaders, Tom's financial contact, and, in a development that three days ago I would have described as impossible, a representative from Mordaunt's remaining political allies, who are here because Mordaunt's operation runs on scrip the same as everyone else's and he is as compromised by this as we are.
Common enemy, Tom had said, sketching this out in the margins of his notes this afternoon. Nobody trusts the currency. Hermetic Order as the target. The room fills with people who have been opponents for three years and who have a shared problem that none of them can solve separately.
It is not alliance. It is not trust. It is the specific temporary cooperation of people who need the same thing right now and who will return to their previous positions the moment the thing is achieved.
It is also, I realize, the most people I have had in the same room working toward the same goal since this war started.