Who: Carrick and Samandriel When: Week 14, Thursday evening Where: the back office of a bank in town Why: Aggressive negotiations. Warning: None.
Carrick had chosen to hold his meeting with Samandriel in one of the office rooms of a Vampire-run bank in the town centre. He wanted privacy, and there was nowhere more private than a building with armored windows and soundproofed walls. Given he had been conducting business with this particular bank for the last 500 years and the managers valued his custom, he found it little trouble to arrange the use of a private meeting room.
He sat composed and still, hands folded on the desk while he waited for two of the slaves owned by the bankers to return from the safety deposit boxes in the cellar of the building. When they returned, one had an attache case padlocked to the metal cuff on his wrist. The slaves stood to attention, as unobtrusively as possible, in the corner of the room.
Carrick's pale gaze fixed on the young man on the other side of the table.
"I suppose you want to see the merchandise."
The ancient Spartan spoke to Samandriel in his native Laconic dialect of Classical Greek, his words blunt and direct. Laconic speech was designed for the shouting of orders across a battlefield and the clipped, pithy rhetorical dialogues for which his countrymen had been infamous. It was not a language for seduction or poetry; its harsh tones were at once as sharp as the point of a sword and as blunt as the stones on which the blades were sharpened.