Lucan Morel

Lucan Morel (born c. 261 AS) is the head of the House of Morel, foremost of the banking houses of Saverra, and the holder of the largest single share of the debts of the Regency of Varrow. He sits Saverra's charter-council, though he speaks there seldom and votes last. Those who have dealt with him describe the same man: lean, grey-eyed, plainly dressed, courteous to debtors and creditors alike, and never once heard to raise his voice. On the quays they call him Old Weight, for his house's stubborn insistence on weighing coin against the old imperial standard, however the mints of Caldmere may shave it.

Early life

He was a third son, trained for the vaults rather than the house. The plague year of 288 AS changed that: the red lamps burned on the Morel door for a winter, and when they came down his father and both elder brothers were dead, and the house itself owed money. Lucan was twenty-seven. He spent the next decade calling in loans other men had written off and declining risks other men called certain, and by the time of Corvan IV's death the House of Morel stood where it stands now, beside the Saverrine Vaults at the head of the League's lenders. The archive has no record of any marriage. What the house records do show, year on year, are licence fees paid to the Collegium of Ash on behalf of his younger brother Tomas, a Hollowed who burned too deeply in the house's service and no longer knows the family that keeps him. Tomas Morel lives in rooms above the counting-house with a remembrance-book the house pays to have copied fair each year. Lucan visits him most evenings. The visits are short; there is only so much news a man can give to a brother who will not keep it.

The Grey Book

Where other houses lend against tolls, plate and land, Morel is said to lend against character, and to keep the evidence in a private ledger known in Saverra as the Grey Book: his own running judgement of the great houses of Varrow, written in his own hand. No debtor has been permitted to read it. Factors who have carried copies of single pages describe entries more like epitaphs than accounts — which lord pays, which lord lies, which lord will be dead by spring, and whose widow will honour the paper. His reported entry on Edric Ardent is the one most often quoted, and probably the least reliable for being so: a candle; lend against the room, not the flame. What the Grey Book says of House Corrow, the house Morel and his fellow creditors have settled on to back when Ardent dies, no one outside the house can say. It is worth recording that the book's judgements have been wrong before: the archive is told he once wrote of a border lord this man will not see winter, and the man saw nine.

Deeds

On the first of Mistmonth, 312 AS, Morel hosted at his Saverra house the small dinner since recorded as the Feast of Unpaid Debts, at which the League's foremost creditors of Varrow received the Regency's envoy Anselm Vey and granted the Regency a bridging loan of forty thousand marks, secured against the tolls of the river Sull for ten years. The terms, the singer Sefa Morrow declines to repeat. What is plain is that Morel set the table, named the sum, and steered the talk away from the Pale Choir's offer of intercession before it could embarrass the envoy, who refused it himself to the table's visible approval. The creditors agreed among themselves that a standing regency's debts were worth more than a crowned emperor's might prove, a new monarch being liable to repudiate the Regency's paper.

The following day his factor Severo Cantel attended the singing of the book of Tavio Grell, a goldsmith of the Salt Stairs, though the House of Morel held no debt against the estate, and offered the widow one hundred marks for the ledger's withheld final page. She refused. Morel's factors have since carried a standing instruction to report any unworked grey stone that cuts glass, offered anywhere between the Sull and the Steppe. The house buys stones, certainly; it has always bought stones. Whether this is more than that, the archive cannot say.

An emperor repudiates; a regency refinances. I do not buy crowns. I buy the ten years before anyone wears one.

Reputation

Morel's letters of credit pass as coin from Caldmere to the Khaddan grazing-towns, which is the League's measure of a man. He is said to be exact without being grasping: he will forgive a debt for a reason given honestly, and pursue a half-mark to the grave for a lie. Asked once what he reckoned the empty throne of Varrow to be worth, he is reported to have answered that an empty chair gathers no debts of its own and obliges the seven men around it to keep borrowing — and that the Sundered Crown, being broken, was worth exactly what men would pay to believe in it. The Crown-men of Caldmere do not care for him. He has never given them cause to refuse his money.

Unanswered questions

• Why the House of Morel wanted the final page of a dead goldsmith's ledger, and at ten times its worth in paper.
• What the Grey Book records of House Corrow, and whether Corrow knows it is backed.
• Whether Morel answers to anyone — the charter-council, his partners, or only his own book — when the Lord Regent dies.