Sebastian · Felsberg, Mercer State
1724
Sebastian had been in Felsberg for six days. For the last five days nobody could tell him where four hundred pounds of iron fastenings had gone. The paperwork said Scale sent it to a warehouse at Iron Port. Three manifests showed up in two clerks’ handwriting sent to that destination, and a receiving stamp dated the fourteenth seemed to confirm the delivery. The warehouse master at Iron Port disagreed. He had never seen the shipment and had never been asked to sign for it. He sent a copy of his own ledger to the Registry with the weary patience of a man used to arguing with auditors. Both records were correct. Both could not be true.
When two honest men’s paperwork disagreed, their honesty was rarely the problem. The fault usually lay with whoever handled the paper in between. Sebastian had come to Felsberg chasing a third clerk’s signature. The city’s whole week was built around the unveiling and that suited him. Officials were away from their offices and the wine made them less careful about who was listening. He had never gone to an occasion that size for its own sake. He did not intend to start.
On the day of the unveiling, six hundred delegates brought Felsberg’s rain in on their coats. Under the colonnade the air smelled of wet wool and of the wine going round on trays. The soldier with the loose thread on his sleeve had been easy to talk to. That was what made him worth talking to.
In nine years of this work Sebastian had been thrown out of only one room, and that was his own fault for hurrying. What kept him in the others was mostly clothes and voice. He dressed like a minor official. Long ago he had given up the upright posture his father taught him. Twice that week someone had asked him to fetch something and both times he fetched it. He asked his questions without hurry, usually with a small joke at his own expense. He sounded too unimportant to be worth lying to.
The soldier had offered him extra bread from kitchens that had been going three days straight. It was probably a true answer. That was not what Sebastian meant. Goods that vanished from one ledger often turned up in another, and a big occasion could swallow them without anyone noticing. Even the practice post had come from somewhere.
He made a small note of it out of habit. He moved on before the soldier could decide whether he had been chatted with or questioned. Someone near the wine tables called a name across the noise. A thin man with ink on his cuff turned and lifted his cup. It was the name Sebastian had come to Felsberg for.
He set his own cup on a passing tray and walked along the colonnade. He had gone four paces when a hand took his elbow. It belonged to a Mercer functionary with a seating list in his other hand. “You.” He did not wait for an answer. “Go down to the kitchens and tell them the east tables want more cups. Then come back and tell me what they said.”
His seal would end the matter. It would also tell everyone what he was. Sebastian looked once toward the wine tables. The thin man was laughing at something and in no hurry. He went.
It was the third time that week someone had sent him running. The kitchens lay down a flight of stairs and along a hallway thick with steam and the smell of new bread. A cook swore at him for the message. The functionary had already forgotten asking by the time Sebastian climbed back up.
The thin man was gone from the wine tables. People were drifting back to the benches and Sebastian could not find him among them. He took a fresh cup from a tray and did not drink from it. He had kept his disguise by being a stranger’s errand runner and the disguise worked a little too well.
The demonstration took maybe four minutes. From the far end of the hall Sebastian watched the light climb the coil ring by ring. The post burst apart with a crack that seemed to come from inside the wood. The smell reached him afterward, sharp and oddly clean. He could not place it.
His mind went on counting, the way it always did. It counted the lamps along the colonnade, and the over-tunics on the honor guard that none of them seemed to fit. Somebody had paid for all of it. Somebody had written it down.
When the crowd started leaving into the courtyard, he went looking for the Scale quartermaster he had come to see. He asked about the workshops as he went. Doran Aleski proved harder to find than the young guard and a good deal less pleased to be approached. He had the weathered irritability of a man who had spent his working life keeping other people’s stores honest. Anyone who approached him on his day off regarding his work seemed to offend him personally.
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He recognized Sebastian’s Guild seal before Sebastian had finished taking it out. He sighed and led the way to a corner of the courtyard away from the wine servers’ route. The eaves along that side were dripping onto the flagstones. Aleski picked the one dry stretch of wall and put his back to it.
“You’re the one asking about the eleven years?” he said.
“I’m asking about several things. That happens to be one of them.”
“The Head Marshal said eleven years in workshops most of us have never heard of.”
“He did.”
“I’ve kept the Republic’s workshop ledgers for twenty-two.”
Aleski was not looking at him.
“I can tell you which materials leave Firestone and which don’t.”
Sebastian waited.
“Stones from the Republic don’t. Not one chip has left the Republic in twenty-two years.” He let that sit. “Copper does. Four separate requests for copper wire left Scale stores in the last six years. All marked for internal Republic use.” Aleski’s mouth tightened. “I can account for three destinations.”
Sebastian went still.
“You’re telling me Mercer may have built this with Scale’s own materials?”
“I’m telling you a fourth request exists on paper and I don’t know where it ended up.”
Aleski lowered his voice. “It could be nothing but a clerical error. The stock might have gone into a domestic project without anyone updating the ledger. I’ve seen it happen before.”
“But you don’t think it’s nothing.”
“I think a nation has just announced that it spent eleven years building this in secret without anyone’s help.” Aleski looked down at the wet flagstones. “And there’s a piece of paper in my record room that raises a question about that. Nobody at Scale has asked me about it. I don’t much like being the only man holding a question that size.”
Sebastian thanked him, and for once he meant it. He wrote nothing down. A request with no destination anyone could trace was safer kept in his head. He was still thinking about it on his way back toward the hall when he realized someone was watching him. Across a crowded courtyard it would have been easy to miss.
A woman in Ardyn colors was giving him her full attention, not the vague politeness most people gave strangers. He suspected she read people the way he read a ledger, looking for the line that did not belong. He held her gaze as long as she did. Neither of them offered anything, not even a nod.
Then she turned to the man in Joyce blue beside her and laughed at something he said. Her warmth came easily. Sebastian did not know her name. He tried to remember her face and went back to Aleski’s question. Copper wire. He pictured the coil again. Tight rings of dark metal ran down from the weapon’s head, wound so close that each ring touched the next.
Copper, he thought.
The whole thing fell into place at once. It was Scale’s wire, drawn in Scale’s workshops and wound around a Mercer weapon that Mercer swore it had built alone. His pulse accelerated. He noticed it the way he would notice a column of figures that balanced too neatly. Then he made himself look at what he had actually seen.
He had seen the coil from the far end of the hall, past six hundred people. The metal was dark and thirty yards away. Even in better light and half that distance, he would not have told the difference between copper and tin. He did not know what the rings were made of.
That was the correct thought, reached in the correct order. The first thought had already taken hold. Sebastian had watched better men lose their posts over conjecture without solid evidence. He made himself stop thinking about it. Even for a few seconds.
The coil could not tell him anything. The numbers behind the weapon might. If Mercer had built the weapon alone, it was a remarkable achievement and everyone else would have to catch up. If Mercer had help, the help had been quiet enough to leave a request in Scale’s records with no destination.
Help that quiet would not stop at wire. Four hundred pounds of iron fastenings had left Scale for a Scale warehouse in a Mercer port and never arrived. Until an hour ago that was a paperwork error at Iron Port. Now it might be the end of a thread.
His father had a plainer rule, one he had brought home from the Registry.
A seal tells you who issued a document. It cannot tell you whether its contents are true.
The receiving stamp at Iron Port was a seal. So was the mark on every request in Aleski’s record room.
His father would have found the day extremely interesting. Sebastian doubted he would have enjoyed much of it. He meant to tell him anyway. He would sit beside him at the window on Weir Street and watch how much of the story his father could still hold. Fei Ling would get the same story in his next letter to Rok. He would leave out the copper, and she would notice.
By evening the courtyard was cold and the wind off the harbor smelled of tar. He flipped his collar up and checked that his satchel was closed over a page of notes.
Then he started deciding which of today’s six hundred delegates he needed to find before they scattered home.