by K. J. Parker
Now she felt quite cheerful, and she picked a small bunch of pretty blue flowers. If something were to happen to Muri (forget about Dorun for the moment), she’d have people being nice to her and possibly a lot of money as well, all of her own, like the rich women in Faralia who’d inherited money from old, ugly husbands. She liked the thought of that; and she wouldn’t be horrible like they were, sad and hungry with their hair dyed and their faces plastered with rouge and white lead; she’d just be herself, but with nobody to bully her or tell her what to do. And Terpsi . . . She scowled again, all her cheerfulness suddenly frozen. It wouldn’t be like having her soldier, a secret in the woods. You couldn’t just have a living person and keep them hidden away somewhere. Being in love was one thing, but it didn’t stay nice for very long. They wanted to kiss you, and all that other stuff, like Muri wanted. She thought: at least when I said no he didn’t get nasty or anything; perhaps I’m better off with him after all, and he’s going to have lots of money soon. But being alone would be better. Besides, Terpsi was a bit stupid, he couldn’t even pull out an arrow without breaking it, and he was scared of the dying deer, which was ridiculous. She’d have to think very carefully about him and decide what she wanted to do.
She felt calmer after that. The cheerfulness had gone, but she wasn’t sad either, because now she had something to think about, something to find out, maybe plans to make. It was all a bit stupid, because it all depended on something happening to Muri, and you couldn’t just ask for stuff like that to happen; you could wait fifty years, like the sour old wives at home, and a person would still go on resolutely living.
She paused to pick some mushrooms: ceps, the best wild mushrooms of all, and quite a lot of them. Ceps were a treat, wasted on them, she thought; they never appreciated what she brought home. You had to be quite clever to gather stuff, you had to know which ones were good to eat and which were poisonous. They’d all said it was her mushrooms that had made Clea throw up, which was simply not true, and unfair. Of course they hadn’t believed her when she’d told them, and now some of them muttered about her and fished the mushrooms out of their food and left them on the side of the plate. People could be so nasty, and she was only trying to help. But they ate the roots, and the wild garlic, which just showed how stupid they were, because mushrooms weren’t the only poisonous things in the forest . . .
She thought about her soldier, in the wood.
Chapter Twelve
The accounts officer was a short, bald, bull-necked man with a weak chin, which made his head look like a thumb. He lived in a small, cramped office in the back annexe of Headquarters, which before the war had been the best inn in Elio. It didn’t take much imagination to guess what purpose his office had served. For one thing, the smell lingered. He didn’t strike Kunessin as the sort of man who’d relish jokes about it, however.
“Quite a sum of money,” he said, with more than a hint of disapproval. “Quite a tidy sum of money, Colonel.” He looked down at the ledger, then back at Kunessin, then down at the ledger again. “You’ve got the affidavits, presumably.”
Kunessin smiled, and handed him the sheaf of papers. He went through them slowly, one by one, a man to whom time was largely irrelevant. “They seem to be all right,” he said, as though congratulating Kunessin on the quality of his forgeries. “I’ll need to check them against the day books, of course. And the requisitions.”
“Of course,” Kunessin replied.
“Assuming it’s all there,” he went on, shifting in his seat, “I’ll need to know who to make the warrants out to.”
“Warrant,” Kunessin corrected him. “Just the one. I’ve got a form of authority signed by the others.”
The head went back, the eyebrows went up. “Just the one warrant,” he said. “For the lot of you.”
“Saves time,” Kunessin said.
It was a pretty weak reason, but the accounts officer didn’t seem inclined to take the point. “In that case,” he said, “I’ll need you to sign a pro forma receipt, for yourself and the rest of the company. And,” he added, squinting down at the paper, “the estate of the late Major Nuctos Di’Ambrosies. Actually, that complicates matters, if you’re taking it all in one warrant. Properly speaking, the executors—”
“That’s me,” Kunessin said. “Sole executor. He made a will, so it’s all in order.”
The accounts officer relaxed slightly. “That’s all right, then,” he said. “You’ve got it with you, presumably.”
Kunessin laid it on the desk. The accounts officer glanced at it. “Fine,” he said. “In that case, just sign here, and here.”
Kunessin reached out for the pen, a stub of quill sharpened down to the vanes. His hand was perfectly steady as he signed. “Is that the lot?”
The accounts officer nodded. “Apart from the checks, yes. Shouldn’t take more than, oh, a week, ten days at the most. When’s your actual date of discharge?”
“Tomorrow.”
Frown. “You’ve cut it a bit fine, haven’t you?” he said. “When’s your shipping date?”
“Tomorrow.”
It was rather pleasant, watching him struggle with that. “Then why the hell didn’t you . . . ?”
Shrug. “Not up to me,” he said. “We’ve been stuck here for six weeks with nothing to do, and then they tell us we’re being sent home tomorrow. So . . .”
The accounts officer sighed. “That’s a pain in the arse,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d agree to having letters of credit sent to you at” - he glanced down - “Faralia? I assume there’s a bank of sorts there.”
Kunessin shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “No disrespect, but I know about military letters of credit. We would quite like our money while we’re still young enough to enjoy it.”
A slight nod of the head, conceding the point. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “I mean, normally there’d be no way. But since it’s not your foul-up . . .”
“Thank you,” Kunessin said graciously. “I can wait while you do it now, if you like.”
That, apparently, wasn’t possible. Not only was there the actual drawing-up of the warrant - it had to be written on special paper in special ink, to circumvent forgery - it also had to be countersigned by the brigadier and the civilian commissioner, both of whom were busy men with short tempers. “Best I can do you is first thing in the morning, say just after reveille,” he said. “I imagine you can skip morning parade, since it’s your last day.”
Kunessin thanked him and left by the back door, directly into the courtyard. He made sure he was out in the street before he stopped, and looked down at his hands. They were shaking.
Guilt, he supposed, but he wasn’t convinced. If he was honest with himself, it was really just the fear of being found out. Not so much by the military; it didn’t do to be complacent, but he’d been fooling them long enough to know he could get away with it, so long as he was careful and very, very particular about details. That wouldn’t be enough to make his hands shake, for the first time since he’d joined the service.
He made himself walk, though his knees were weak. Muri wouldn’t be a problem. Kudei - Kudei was shrewd, but he’d never shown much interest in the money. Understandably; the first thing he’d do when he got home would be to hand it over to his brothers, who’d waste it all in six months and leave nothing to show for it. Fly was very keen on money, and sharp enough to pick up on anything that wasn’t quite right, but it’d never cross his mind that one of the company would do anything to cheat the others. It was Aidi who’d be the danger; precise, meticulous Aidi, the man who always added up bills, checked invoices, read documents before signing them; Aidi, with his inherited skill at maths, and his annoying instinct to question every damn thing.
He went back to the barracks, but not to their quarters. Instead, after checking to see that nobody was watching, he darted up the spiral steps to the deputy paymaster’s office, long since vacated after the staff had been relocated to Headquarters. Under the be
nch, in the dust, among the rat droppings and shredded scraps of paper, was an old wooden trunk. He lifted the lid, took out a handful of papers and a clerk’s portable inkwell, and sat down on one of the high stools.
The accounts, when he’d finished them, were a work of art. Mostly, he used false deductions to get rid of Nuctos’ share. It was a sensible approach, since nearly all the deductions - for clothing, kit replacements, storage, shipping, agency, expenses of sale - were genuine, or would have been if he hadn’t figured out many subtle ways of not paying them, or pretending they’d been paid (forged vouchers, forged letters of credit - God bless the service for being so unreliable in its banking procedures - false requisitions and so forth). It was a relatively straightforward matter to write them in, doubling or trebling the amounts, recalculating the running totals and carrying forward the reduced amounts to the summary. Aidi would be furious, of course; he’d complain bitterly about how much the army had screwed out of them for things they should have provided gratis. But he’d believe; he’d often said that nothing the service did by way of underhanded, ungrateful, mean, spiteful deductions would ever surprise him. No problem there.
Next, he systematically devalued the receipts by twenty per cent. Consistency was the great thing here. So long as the market prices for salvaged goods appeared to stay roughly the same, it was unlikely that any of them would be suspicious. It was extremely unlikely that they’d ever be in a position to check the prices actually raised at auction, since as far as he knew the results weren’t published anywhere, and the buyers wouldn’t tell anybody what they’d paid.
Next, he allowed himself a little daring, and wrote off one entire consignment as lost at sea. He didn’t choose the most valuable one, the aftermath of the battle of Synaxa. Instead, he picked a middle-range consignment, one that had gone through about the time the enemy navy had enjoyed a brief spell of success in commerce raiding. That only disposed of a modest amount, but it’d mean he wouldn’t have to be so rapacious elsewhere. Little and often was the way to go.
Once he’d finished, he carefully wrote out the fair copy, checked and double-checked it, folded it and put it away in his pocket. That, he knew, would be the great leap of faith: explaining what had become of the detail accounts, and why he only had the main account to show them. He’d thought through various explanations, but decided in the end to tell them that the accounts office were holding the detail papers for examination - which might well have happened, after all, if there wasn’t the sudden desperate rush to get the warrant drawn in one day. He was modestly proud of that, and it hadn’t been too hard to arrange.
Last of all, the part he’d been both looking forward to and dreading: comparing the true sum of the warrant with the revised version. He did the simple arithmetic, looked at the result and frowned. It was, as the accounts officer would have said, a tidy sum, but it wasn’t enough. It would pay for a comfortable retirement, or a nice little business somewhere; it’d more than pay for a good farm (but the only good farm wasn’t for sale). For what he had in mind, however, it was simply inadequate.
For a long time he sat with the papers in front of him, staring at the wall. Blessed with a vivid imagination, he’d thought of all manner of ways in which his plan could go horribly wrong, but this wasn’t one of them. Not enough money. He suddenly leaned forward, snatched up the summary sheet and checked the calculations yet again. No mistake. The whole miserable business, in other words, for nothing.
Like a weak chairman trying to bring an unruly meeting to order, he tried to clarify his thoughts. For one thing, if the plan had failed, what was he going to do with all the money? The answer to that was fairly obvious: divide it up properly, honestly, so that each of them got his fair share. Yes, he thought, I could do that; and then Kudei’s useless brothers would waste his share, buying cattle that died and seedcorn that wouldn’t grow, extra land they couldn’t work, which would weed over and revert to scrub. Aidi would take his share and invest it wisely; in a few years he’d be a prosperous man of business, with no time for his old friends from the war. Fly would most likely drink himself to death; Muri would lose it all somehow, to a pretty, smart girl or a flock of long-lost poor relations. It would be the end of A Company, and that meant the end of everything he’d had since his father lost the farm. So: not that, then. He was stuck with his involuntary trusteeship, until he could find some way to make good on his unspoken promise.
He thought long and hard, and the more he thought, the clearer the answer became. There was only one thing he could do.
The colonel was surprised to see him. “You’re shipping out tomorrow, aren’t you?”
He shook his head. “That’s what I wanted to see you about,” he said. “I changed my mind. I want to stay on.”
The food was running out again. Aidi worked out a rationing system that’d stretch their reserves for another six weeks, by which time the ship should have returned from Faralia. Kunessin proposed it to an extraordinary general meeting of the company. The proposal passed comfortably, but not unanimously.
Two days after the meeting, the workers came home from the river to be met by Dorun and Enyo, both looking grim and worried. Apparently, someone had stolen a half-hundredweight jar of flour from the store.
“Are you sure about that?” Aidi said. “You’re sure you’ve counted right?”
Enyo glared at him. Dorun said, “When you came up with the rationing idea, Enyo and I organised the stores so we’d know what we were doing. We chalked numbers on all the flour jars, and we made a tally, so we’d know exactly how much was left in the open jar each day. So yes, we’re sure.”
Dead silence. Then Kunessin said: “In that case, we’ll have to search for it. Aidi, you’re with me; we’ll do the main house and the outbuildings. Muri and Fly, scout round the yard, and you might take a look up by the jetty, all round there. Kudei, you take someone with you and search the animal pens, it could be stashed in with the feed. If we don’t find it tonight, we’ll do the woods in the morning.”
It was Kunessin himself who found the jar, in a corner of the burned-out grain store, hidden (rather badly) behind a few old sacks. It was empty.
“Which makes it a damn sight harder,” he explained to another general meeting later that evening. “Whoever took it’s clearly no fool. I imagine he’s parcelled the flour up in small pots and bags and hidden it away all over the place.” He paused, then went on, “It’s up to you what we do now. We can keep looking, but my guess is, it’ll take a long time and we may not find anything; that’s at least a day’s lost production. On the other hand, this is about as serious a crime as you can get. If we don’t catch whoever did it, we’re practically inviting a repeat performance.”
Awkward silence; then Aechmaloten stood up and said: “I agree it’s a serious matter, and if we catch the bastard, I vote we kill him. But it’s only fifty pounds of flour. A whole day’s work lost is a lot of money.”
Nobody said anything, and Aechmaloten sat down again. After a very long pause, Kunessin said, “Well, we’ve got a proposal: forget about it and cut the ration to compensate. All in favour.”
Aidi voted against; so did Muri and three of the indentured men. Kunessin abstained. “Vote carried, then,” Kunessin said edgily. “Aidi, you’re the mathematician. You’d better work out a new ration.”
It was a long, silent evening, and they didn’t bother with the gold ceremony. Aidi lifted the previous day’s seal, dumped the day’s proceeds in the big jar and sealed it up again, and nobody spoke. Next day, though, the indentured men had a long whispered debate before setting off for the river, and it didn’t take much imagination to guess what they were talking about, or the conclusions they drew. A Company held more or less the same debate during the noon break.
“It’s not exactly difficult,” Aidi insisted. “We know where we all were yesterday: we were here, up to our waists in cold water and mud. I’m pretty sure I can vouch for all of us and the servants too.”
“
Fine,” Alces snapped. “Problem solved. Nobody stole it. The jar went for a stroll and got mugged by rats.”
“I wasn’t at the river,” Kunessin pointed out.
“And neither were the girls,” Kudei said. “Don’t look at me like that; it’s what you’ve all been thinking, and so have they, you can bet your life,” he added, nodding towards the indentured men.
“Oh come on,” Muri protested. “What you’re saying is, one of our wives—”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Alces said briskly. “Because it had to be. And just think about it, will you? Say one of us steals a jar of flour. What are we supposed to do with it? All the pots and pans are in the lean-to, right? And there’s at least one of the girls in there all the time. We couldn’t just sneak in and bake a quick loaf or brew up a crafty bowl of porridge. But one of the girls—”
“Who exactly did you have in mind?” Muri asked icily.
“Fly’s not naming any names,” Aidi interrupted. “But he’s got a point, you must admit. A woman cooking: hardly likely to arouse suspicion.”
Muri scowled at him. “Well you can cross Menin off your list, for a start,” he said. “She was out in the woods, so it can’t have been her.”
“Unless she came back without being seen,” Aidi replied. “That’s entirely possible. She does come back early sometimes.”
“I think your Chaere’s the lead suspect,” Muri replied angrily. “She moans enough about being hungry all the time.”
Aidi was about to reply to that, but Kunessin forestalled him. “That’s not being helpful, Muri,” he said. “You’re the only one mentioning names.”