Lazaro made his fortune on a single conviction: that the price of a Drasnian dwarf would never stop rising. For three centuries the trade through the Slaver's Coast had done nothing else. Demand outran supply year after year, the mines of the south swallowed every body the ships could carry, and a man who bought forward contracts on slave-prices and simply held them grew richer in his sleep than most merchants did at their work. Lazaro did this on a scale no one else dared, borrowing against his own holdings to buy still more of the same bet, until half of Azantir's speculators were copying him and the other half were lending to him.
The conviction had one flaw. It assumed there would always be a buyer at the far end, and the largest buyer at the far end was Kyagos. The island's mines had eaten Drasnian labor for three hundred years. Then Syvlius burned, the slaves there rose and pulled down a trade tower, and the Dead Moon Tribe came out of Moonwood to finish the work. In a single season the deepest market for slave labor in the western seas closed. Prices that had climbed for three centuries turned over and began to fall, and Lazaro is the man holding the most paper bought at the top.
He cannot unwind it fast enough. Every contract he sells to cover his losses pushes the price down further and deepens the losses on the contracts he still holds, so the more he tries to save himself the faster he sinks. His creditors have begun to ask questions he answers badly. What makes his ruin dangerous to the rest of them is that Lazaro's bet was never really his alone. It was the empire's own assumption made into a financial instrument, the belief that the trade is eternal, that the ships will always run and always find a market, written down and leveraged a hundredfold. When that belief cracks on one man's books, everyone who shares it learns what it was actually worth.
Esmeraz wants him gone before the lesson spreads. The Praetor runs the slave-markets, and the markets run on confidence; a famous speculator collapsing in public is a rumor that the trade itself is finished, which is the one rumor Esmeraz cannot allow. So the master of the markets and the man who bet his life on them have become enemies at the worst possible moment for both. Lazaro needs time and a buyer; Esmeraz needs him quiet and ideally liquidated in private, before the panic he represents arrives at the auction blocks.
Lazaro will tell you the price is only resting. The price is not resting. The price has remembered that it can fall. — a rival speculator, in the wine-rooms above the Azantir Roads