Olmedo hadn't lied. She really had given Annan the easiest pile to deal with. Even if he dragged Martin over, they could sort it out with a simple "yes" or "no." Don't ask how.
Once he was done, Annan felt capable again. He got up and pulled out the Gold Depository's report for its first week.
In the first seven days, it had issued a total of forty thousand Deposit Certificates and paid out 187,000 Gold Narls.
The vast majority had gone to merchants who had seen the "Three Merchants" advertisement. Annan's ad had struck precisely where it mattered most to them.
And as Gold Depositories opened across the region starting in the second week, those figures were expected to grow exponentially.
Rather than worry about raising 7.5 million Gold Narls in twenty-three days, Annan needed to worry about keeping the Gold Depositories safe.
After all, if a Gold Depository was robbed or looted, the local Lord certainly wouldn't reimburse them.
Only the Disciplinary Legion could serve as Guards. Even the Hellfire Legion, foremost of the Three Great Legions, had to admit that the Disciplinary Legion was Free City's strongest.
Olmedo chose to send them out to protect the Gold Depositories, where trouble was all but certain. Annan also assigned five Knight Golems and five Guardian Golems to each one.
Just having Golems stand at the entrance would discourage plenty of thieves. It might even spark another surge in Golem sales, which were close to stalling.
For now, Golems were mainly "sold" to the Rikaner Kingdom and the Dimon Kingdom. The quotation marks were for the Dimon Kingdom, which never paid.
Everywhere else accounted for little more than Leila's catch—two or three small fish.
There was no helping it. Golems were expensive and couldn't operate for long, and those remained