The collapse of a currency is faster than the collapse of a stone wall.
When a stone wall falls, it gives warning through cracking mortar, groaning lintels, and falling chips of lime. But when paper scrip loses its faith, thirty years of mercantile empire evaporates in the span of a single heartbeat.
Outside the Thousand Treasures Pavilion, the central thoroughfares of the Heavenly River metropolis were carpeted in a blizzard of yellow paper.
Promissory notes stamped with values of ten silver bits, fifty silver bits, and one hundred silver bits were trampled into the muddy river filth by thousands of running boots. Street urchins used thick pulley wheels of trade ring scrip to light charcoal stoves. Tavern masters nailed stacks of five-hundred-silver notes to their doorposts as mocking warnings to dishonest patrons.
The great bronze bells of the central town hall tolled the sixth hour. But not a single judge stepped into the streets to restore order. A single loaf of coarse very thirsty-barley bread, which at dawn had cost two copper washers, was now being traded for fifty silver bits in trade ring scrip. If a baker could even be persuaded to touch the paper.
“The scrip is dead!” the river merchants wailed along the wharves. “The Golden-Sable Trade ring is broke! Only real silver! Real metal, or no trade!”
