Ace of Diamonds

Keywords - Upright: the contract fulfilled, payment with deductions  ·  Inverted: leverage in the ledger, a client who won't let go

Upright

The sword arm won the day. The invoice is already on the table. Victory arrived with a contract attached.

The job is done and the pay is real - counted out under the client's eye, against the client's copy of the terms. That is the nature of hired work: the wage arrives with arithmetic attached. An escrow held back for damages, a clause invoked, expenses that were always going to come out of your end. Take the purse. Just count it before you praise it.

Inverted

The money was the simple part; it is the relationship that has grown a hook. A client who has used you once knows what you did and how you did it, and some clients file that knowledge where the next negotiation can reach it. The cost of this job is becoming the terms of the next one. What their hold is, and what it takes to slip it - that is the next draw.

In Play

Upright. The company takes the bridge intact, as contracted - and the client's assessor deducts the burned tollhouse and a splintered span from the fee, clause by clause.

Inverted. At settlement the lord's clerk mentions, mildly, that he knows which banner the company marched under at Wefford - and names a winter rate for their continued service that is barely half the summer one.