Sebastian · Firestone, Republic of Scale
1724
The grain warehouse on Vellun Street had eleven months of receipts that were not balanced and Sebastian was given four days to discover why. Four days bothered Sebastian more than the missing grain. He walked with his satchel against his hip as the grain dust thickened from the sheds. A discrepancy at an ordinary warehouse would only be allotted an afternoon of attention. Some never even got that much. A clerk would just mark the loss as spoilage and return to whatever work his superior considered more important. Four days meant someone expected Sebastian to find something or wanted him occupied. Sebastian disliked both possibilities but he kept them in mind when he entered the warehouse.
Petrin had been the warehouse master for eight years. The relief on the man’s face when he saw Sebastian made any formal introduction unnecessary. “I’ve been asking for an audit since spring.”
“I read your letters.” Sebastian said it mildly and a little too softly. Petrin leaned in to hear it.
“All of them?”
“All four.” Sebastian put his satchel onto the desk. “The third was useful. You stopped calling it a counting error and admitted you didn’t understand it.”
Petrin gave a startled laugh. “You prefer that?”
“It leaves me something to discover.”
The warehouse master’s smile faded. Petrin showed him the desk at the back where the cold numbed his fingers and grain dust settled in the folds of the ledgers. The iron wheels clanged over the threshold whenever the yard doors opened. The lamp went out twice. Relighting it left the stale air smelling of burnt wick. It was a Forge lamp, older than Petrin’s service at the warehouse. The glass had gone dark years ago and someone had put a wick in an oil cup inside rather than pay to have it relit. Sebastian turned up the wick until its light shone on all the paperwork.
The books were well kept. A careless ledger would have figures copied into the wrong month or a number missing. Here the entries were legible and the sums balanced. The shortfall was just as regular. Between six and nine sacks disappeared each month from a warehouse that moved four hundred a week. He marked the dates in his own book.
“Rats,” Petrin suggested, watching his pen.
“Yours keep a calendar.”
Petrin leaned over the table. “Meaning?”
“The grain disappears the second week of every month. For eleven months, they made it look like a discrepancy that anyone could overlook and mark as a loss.”
Petrin studied the dates. “Then it isn’t rats.”
“I’ve never known one that could read.”
Ferro Kanden had served as clerk for nineteen years. At sixty-five, he answered questions with the precision of a man accustomed to having his answers ignored. “Quarter books or running accounts?”
“The running accounts first.”
“Those are worse.” Kanden reached for a volume without checking the label on its spine. “The figures are sound enough but two men make the entries. One of them can hardly count.”
“Which one?”
“Does it matter?”
“It might.”
Kanden set the book before him. “He’s twenty and he’ll improve if someone gives him the chance.”
There was no plea in Kanden’s voice which made Sebastian listen carefully. Sebastian liked him. That was no reason to alter the examination, though liking a man sometimes made him reluctant to finish one.
He found the fraud on the second morning and he resented how little investigation it required. Firestone’s warehouses used a weighing system older than the Republic. Each cart went over the weighbridge loaded and then again after unloading. The difference was recorded as the weight of grain received. The carter and the weighman signed the slip before it went into a box for the clerk. Kanden alone compared those slips with the entries in the ledger.
Sebastian began with the weighbridge because that was where he would have stolen. A weighman could shave a little from every load and sell the difference elsewhere. The books would remain correct because they would only repeat the same annotation. He gave the idea most of an hour before he let it go. Each slip carried two marks and no carter with sense would sign under a weight lighter than the grain that had just been hauled. The slips were good. The theft began afterward.
Sebastian found it halfway down a page from late winter. Kanden had not entered the weight written beside the correct delivery. He had copied the smaller number from the line directly beneath it. Every calculation that followed used the same figure so the ledger balanced. The difference remained unaccounted for. The false number was a real one. It stood on a genuine slip in the box under two honest marks, so a man who checked the figure alone would find it there. Only matching the slips to the carts showed that the figure belonged to another delivery.
Sebastian laid the slip beside the corresponding page. He saw the method in less than two minutes. Proving it across eleven months took four hours. He began with a question. An accusation often made a man defend himself before he knew what Sebastian could prove. “How long have you been doing the final entries yourself?”
“Nineteen years.”
“Who checks them?”
Kanden rested his hands flat on the table. “Wilhem checked them until he died four years ago and they never appointed anyone else.”
“Since then, you’ve been the only man comparing the slips with the ledger?”
“Yes.”
Sebastian placed the evidence between them and turned it toward Kanden.
The old clerk looked from one figure to the other. “Ah.” His hands remained still.
In the last nine years Sebastian had taken confessions from various people. Once from a man who tried to eat the evidence. He had never received a confession quite like this. “How long?”
“Eleven months.”
“Why begin then?”
“My wife has been ill for six years,” Kanden said without any bid for sympathy. “Eleven months ago, the physicians could do nothing more for her. Then a woman from the Divine Coast showed up seemingly out of nowhere and started to ease her pain. And for a while it helped a great deal.”
“How long?”
“Four months. I don’t expect it to excuse me.”
“It won’t. And afterward?”
“Afterward, my wife’s pain returned. The woman still demanded pay.”
A cart rattled past the open door and its wheels struck the stones hard enough to shake dust from the frame. Sebastian let the noise recede. “You could’ve applied for relief.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“It’s a four-month process and there’s a form.” He turned one hand over the table. “I’ve been filling forms for nineteen years so I knew exactly how long it would take for it to get approved and come back.”
“How much?”
“Eleven silver a month. The relief came in the fifth month. She charged fourteen.”
Sebastian opened his book. Beneath the dates he wrote, Kanden admitted taking six to nine sacks a month for eleven months. His pen moved to the next line where he could write about Kanden’s wife and the eleven silver of relief. Sebastian lifted the pen instead.
“You could have burned the older books.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“I considered burning them on Tuesday and spent an hour thinking about it.” Kanden looked at the ledger. “Then I figured the man they sent would find the smaller number almost immediately and ask where the old ledgers had gone. I know how to explain a discrepancy on paper but destroyed records are harder.”
“That’s sound reasoning.”
“Sound reasoning is part of the job.” Kanden looked at the two pages side by side between them. “It can’t be helped at the end of it.”
“Is there anything you want recorded that I haven’t asked?”
Kanden took his time to think about it properly and Sebastian let him.
“No,” he said. “It’s all correct.”
The younger clerk was waiting at the yard door. Sebastian had seen him only from behind, hunched over the running accounts with his elbows spread wide. Up close he looked younger than twenty. Ink had dried in the creases of his knuckles.
“My entries,” the boy said. “Will they go in the report?”
“Yes.”
The boy stayed in the doorway. A cart had pulled up behind him and the carter shouted for room. “The corrections in my columns are his. He sat with me after the yard closed and never said a word about them to Master Petrin.”
“I know who wrote them in.”
“Then you know what he did for me.”
Sebastian did. It was on every page of the running accounts. “They’ll still go in.”
The boy looked at him a moment longer. Then he stepped back against the doorpost and bowed. The bow was too low and it lasted too long. He held it until Sebastian had walked past him into the yard.
The report filled four pages that evening. It traced each altered entry through the accounts to the total. He recorded Kanden’s full confession along with his own assessment that no second party was involved. Apart from the theft, he described the bookkeeping as exemplary. He read that paragraph again before sealing the report. The Council Registry had no column for exemplary.
The younger clerk went into the report too, by name. His entries in the running accounts were full of corrections and a report that left them out would not have been accurate. Kanden had said the boy would improve if anyone gave him a chance. Sebastian wrote the line and did not read it again. Sebastian had calculated the value of the stolen grain on his walk back from the warehouse, then checked the sum because it seemed too small to ruin a man. At the Firestone rate the grain was worth less than a Legionar’s annual pay. The audit itself had cost several times as much.
On the day of Kanden’s confession Sebastian had stopped outside the weighbridge office to adjust his satchel strap and while he stood there a loaded cart turned into the yard two doors down. He watched it disappear beneath the beam and another followed before the first came out empty. The satchel strap did not need fixing but he kept his hand on the buckle. Sebastian had been in a small room with an old man for two hours and he was in no hurry to reach his desk. By the time he let the strap fall, eleven loaded carts had gone in beneath that beam. He saw no one weigh any of them. There was no weighbridge in the yard. A man at a table took each carter’s word and entered it in a book while the teams waited and walked in the mud.
His first thought was the obvious one. The yard was poorly kept and somewhere in the Registry an examiner had probably marked it for inspection. Then Sebastian looked again. Work piled up where no one wanted responsibility. Records went unfinished because everyone assumed someone else would complete them. This yard was busy and disorganized. That’s still not an excuse.
Sebastian walked over to the other warehouse. His assignment gave him no authority here. Even so, a yard moving this much freight should have been easier to account for than it appeared to be. Either no one was keeping proper track of what passed through it or someone preferred that nobody could.
Sebastian thought one question would not hurt. “Plenty of grain coming in.”
“Always is.” The man kept writing.
“How much grain passes through?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“An estimate would do.”
The pen stopped. “I couldn’t give you one of those either. I write what the carters tell me and put it in the box. Someone collects it.”
“Who checks the figures?”
The man shrugged and dipped his pen. Sebastian knew that indifference. He had seen it often enough in honest men who were never required to know more.
“Whose warehouse is this?”
“Ordnance.”
“Scale Ordnance?”
“Says so on the gate.”
Sebastian looked at the gate. The timber carried no lettering or mark of any kind.
Before he wrote the report Sebastian stopped at the Registry and asked whether an examiner had been assigned to the other warehouse. The clerk checked the index and found no current case.
“Look back five years.”
The clerk turned the pages and ran a finger beneath each entry. “Nothing.”
“Why?”
“No complaint.” He closed the index. “Was there something else you needed?”
Sebastian thanked him. The clerk was already reaching for the next slip on his pile. Petrin’s four letters brought an examiner to his door. The result of the inquiry would strip an old clerk of his livelihood after nineteen years.
Forty feet away, a warehouse appeared to move ten times as much grain on a fraction of the paperwork. No one wrote to the Registry about it and the man entering the figures had no duty to question them. Sebastian could report a discrepancy only if one record contradicted another. A man could steal from this yard for twenty years and leave behind a perfectly correct ledger.
Sebastian stopped at Weir Street on his way home. Coal smoke hung low in the street and above the roofs a dull red glow rose from the Scar. His father was awake. He sat by the window beneath the blanket he had refused twice that week. His face was turned toward the dark glass. The room smelled of cold ash. Sebastian set down his satchel and moved a log onto the embers.
“You’re late.”
“I had a report to finish.”
“A good one?”
Sebastian considered lying but did not because his father had spent thirty-four years learning to detect a lie. “An accurate one.”
The old man grunted. He had joined the Registry back when it held nine men and watched it grow into a building that held a hundred and forty. He had opinions about that process which he had mostly stopped voicing since winter. Sebastian missed the complaints more than he expected to.
“Sit down,” his father said. “You’re standing there as though you expect instructions.”
Sebastian pulled a chair up beside him. “There was another warehouse two doors away from the one I examined. Perhaps ten times the grain passing through with no weighbridge. One man entered whatever the carters told him.”
“Did someone send a complaint to the Registry?”
“Nothing. No one has complained.”
“Then there’s no case.”
“I know.”
His father slowly turned his head. “That isn’t what I said. I said there’s no case and you said you know. Those are different sentences and you’ve been in a bad mood since you came through the door.”
Sebastian looked toward the hearth. The new log was catching now and splitting softly along its grain. “The man I caught was sixty-five. His books were the best I’ve examined.” He rubbed a spot of dried ink on his thumb. “His wife is ill and he’d applied for relief knowing to the month how long it would take to arrive.”
“So he wasn’t a thief by nature?”
“He was a thief on paper.”
“Most are.” His father settled against the chair. “How much?”
“Nearly ninety sacks over eleven months.”
The old man said nothing for so long that Sebastian leaned forward to see whether his father’s eyes were closed. These lapses were familiar now but he still resented waiting for the end of a conversation his father might have forgotten.
“When I was your age we opened one file a week,” his father said. “We finished it before opening another.”
Sebastian sat back.
“Now they open forty and close six. Which six do you suppose?”
“The ones an examiner can finish in four days.”
His father pulled the blanket closer. “Exactly. Nobody decided to be corrupt. It’s what a large office does when nobody is watching and each man sees only the work on his own desk. And this year they’ll want them finished sooner. The Primaris’s term is running into its last stretch and no office cares to be caught holding an open investigation when his chair changes hands.”
“That’s worse.”
“It’s harder to prosecute.”
Sebastian laughed before he could help it. His father returned his gaze to the window and Sebastian could not tell whether the remark was meant as a joke. Then he thought of the four days written across the top of his assignment and wondered if he was the right person for it.
He sat at the table in his room afterward. He had opened neither the expense ledger nor the drawer beside his knee. His father repeated a warning about the work perhaps twice a year always in the same flat voice.
A seal tells you who issued a document. It cannot tell you whether its contents are true.
Sebastian had understood it when he was nine years old as a warning about forgery. Kanden had left eleven months of evidence against himself and an examiner needed two days to find it. At the other warehouse there was no independent record to test a single entry against.
You could not forge a document that did not exist.
He contemplated it for a while and it led him nowhere. He had four days to account for a shortfall but had done it in two. The report was already sealed. He opened the drawer and took out his private notebook. It held entries, most of them several years old and none of them connected to anything. Beneath the last line he added another.
Vellun Street, east yard. Eleven loaded carts observed, no weighbridge. No examination recorded in five years. Unmarked gate. Scale Ordnance, according to the clerk.
He waited for the ink to dry before closing the book and returning it to the drawer.