"I would like to purchase an hour of a fifth circle banker's time."

"Of course." The teller leads her into a private room. They verify her identity with a truthtelling and a runner is sent for the cleric.

About fifteen minutes later, a well-dressed man with a prominent silver holy symbol around his neck walks in.

"Hello. I am Fiducia Victor Andre. You are Tencednil, with information about the break in?"

"I am Tencednil. The break-in's culprit was searching for the identity of the caster with whom I recently made a contract. I can repeat that under Truthtelling if you wish me to. Relatedly, I believe I will be the culprit's next target in hunting down that information, and would like to request shelter in whatever form the Church of Abadar can give me. Ideally this would be something which permits catching whoever or whatever is sent after me, but if that is impossible I would settle for security for myself."

"Please repeat that under truthtelling." He will cast the truthtelling on her, if she's willing.

She is! She will happily repeat everything she just said. Her actions being the only plausible cause for the recent changes is clear enough to not need more confirmation.

"Thank you. We have no facilities within Korvosa that can passively secure you against this threat. We have a few options." He pauses to think.

"You can purchase shelter and transport to a more secure facility, such as the High Vault in Absalom or the Black Dome in Osirion. Those defenses will hold against almost anything. However, this will be quite expensive and I doubt our criminal will bother even trying to follow you there."

"Alternatively, we can do our best to secure you using an active guard within the city. They've already penetrated our local Bank's most secure vaults once, and they can probably do it again. But if you want to... bait them into being caught, we can hold you in a living space there. This will also be expensive."

"I would prefer the bait strategy. How much would it cost, given that it is in furtherance of your search for the culprit?"

Fiducia Andre speaks with an aide. "The current rate for that kind of security is around three hundred gold sails per day. You will be payed a bounty for the information you have already given, and a further bounty for more information if you have it. If our criminal is caught via this strategy, we will cover fifty percent of the security costs. If our missing clerics are found as a result of such a capture, their bounty will be paid in part to you. Is this an acceptable agreement?"

"It is." She'll send a note to Mother, but Mother knows she doesn't need the full story.

Tencednil isn't going to tell the Bank about the vision in detail. If Ulon has prophecy and is keeping it secret, she won't break that secrecy even to save her life. Beyond that... nothing was so important to be worth a death chance.

She tells him about her whole plan, with the bets, the letter, and the nonexistent counterparty who was supposed to own the anonymous accounts. She received information about the Breaching results, the King's death at the breath of Glarataxus, and what the court should have been doing in the next week all from one source, which she refuses to name, and the bets were to monetize that and support her fateful warning. The King seems to have listened, but the same source claimed the bank break-in would not have happened without her acting here, and so it is motivated by what she has done. She elaborates where he asks for detail, aside from avoiding any explanation of her source, though she does want to get moving in not too long.

The Fiducia listens attentively. "Well, this is quite a mess. Glarataxus is clearly not working alone... unless he is much older than our records indicate. Evidently someone is unhappy their plot was foiled. If you are ready, we should move to the main branch in North Point. We can travel either by carriage or by teleport, if you wish to purchase one. Be aware I can only prepare one teleport per day."

She walked here without issue, so the attackers probably aren't onto her yet. The Teleport would only have been necessary if she needed to hide outside Korvosa for some reason. 

"A carriage will work."

He stands up. "Very well, please follow me." He leads her out the back door of the branch. There is a carriage waiting for them. "After you."

If the bank isn't trustworthy for this, she's already dead. She walks in.

The carriage sets off! The main branch is somewhere around five to ten minutes away. Tencednil can hear the sound of horses running across cobbled streets.

She does still have some of her hour of Fiducia Andre's time, and now, knowing what she does, she's sure there should have been some better way to set up the anonymous account. She did need to have access to the money, though, and the codeword setup makes that quite difficult.

"Obviously I should have asked the Bank to copy and burn the paperwork, to prevent whoever this is from finding me through it. Is there any account setup which would have let large withdrawals work smoothly while staying anonymous, though? The codewords to authenticate orders are too easily spied on and copied to be secure. They were enough to identify me to send the letter, but relying on them for thousands of gold sails would never work."

       "We do have a service for this purpose! You know the ancient Taldane cipher, I can't recall who originated it, which simply shifts every letter by a certain step along the alphabet?"

"I have heard of it, yes. It never seemed secure."

       "It isn't! Not at all, you can just guess the offset number and decode a message. We couldn't trust that any more than your codewords! Slightly more advanced, there's a substitution code, connecting your letters in a ring and switching every one to the next, like so. Or a few smaller rings, that also works."

"And that's safe?"

       "Not at all! It's far better, of course, but with three or four sentences you can start to guess what letters correspond to what. It takes time, but not enough for security above a few hundred silver shields. Only a century or so before the death of Aroden, a clever Taldan, one Bellaso, found an improvement. He was trying to send secret messages too sensitive for a wizard to hear, so without a Sending, but cheaply enough to be done at scale, and was willing to slow them down if that was needed— Ah, but you don't have time for a full history lesson, perhaps someone at the main branch can explain it. Say you have a codeword, and the other does as well. Like the ancient cipher, turn your words into numbers, and also turn your codeword to numbers. Go through the message and your codeword in order, and add the numbers — so if your message starts 'from account' and your codeword is 'coin', you add 3+6=9, 15+18=33 and we wrap around to 7, 15+9=24, 13+14=27 and we wrap around to 1, and then back to the start of the codeword, so 1+3=4. Turn those back into letters, and write that out. As far as we know, it can't be broken!"

"So that's safe?"

       "Well, mostly — you should really use a longer code-phrase if it's for large accounts, and it shouldn't have too much meaning to you or a Divination can sometimes find the code. This also doesn't stop a single message from being given to the Bank multiple times, or someone can shift a letter if they know how many letters to shift it by even without knowing what it started as. We add a check signature at the end to avoid that, and you can incorporate a date range into there to prevent duplicate orders from being processed— ah, we're here."

The carriage pulls up to the back entrance of the Bank of Abadar's main branch. The main entrance, out front, is secured by a shield-wall of guards. The back entrance is secured by a very very good lock, enhanced with magic. Arrow slits open down from the second floor above them. Guardsmen patrol the street. 

Fiducia Andre steps out of the carriage.

She's either walking straight into a trap that will never release her or taking the best chance she has at safety. And she's committed at this point. No reason to back down now.

Tencednil steps out of the carriage—

The security at the Bank of Abadar is good... but it's not that good.

You can buy nearly anyone, for a high enough price. Every month, at random times, the Bank checks each employee worth anything for mundane betrayal and hostile magic. Greater magic aura deals with the detect magic and enchantment sight. Abadar's truthtelling is foiled by a wondrous item lent to his servant that casts glibness once per day. It's incredibly cheap to craft for how useful it is.

(Most wizards might complain about how difficult it is to craft items that require spells you can't cast. Most of them have never bothered trying. It helps if you've watched someone cast that same spell a dozen times under greater arcane sight.)

There are many misconceptions about what a bag of holding is. Some envision it as a small pouch, possibly clipped to a belt or pant. A bag of holding is a four foot wide cloth sack with an opening wide enough to fit a small person.

His body leans against the wall of an attic, two hundred feet from the Bank. A dominated slave holds the bag of holding open, facing the ceiling. He looks through the senses of a different dominated slave who lives in an apartment adjacent to the Bank, and sees Tencednil step out from the carriage.

Many spells don't need line of sight. But there are those rare examples, some say from Azlant, some say from even stranger times, which don't need line of effect.

Possession.

She stops in her tracks. Every priest and guard looking at the carriage immediately sees her body language change dramatically, as if she was suddenly a human merely Altered into this form — and she slumps somewhat, as if unprepared to hold up her own weight with the strength she has. Not Dominated, though, they would recognize that.

That's fine. By the time they've processed that and figured out what's happening, it will be too late to matter. She glances around momentarily, then dashes back into the carriage, trying to get out of sight of any possible Dispel casters for just a few seconds.

The Fiducia begins to move. "What are you—"

Too late. Dimension Door.

Tencednil's body appears three feet in the air, directly above the bag of holding. Once she falls in, his slave pulls the opening shut.

He dismisses the possession, uses his real body to grab his slave and the bag—

Plane shift.