"Come."
The study was warm and smelled of ink and cold tea. Vesper Callowmere sat behind a desk that was too large for her with her hair pinned up, surrounded by papers in a state that Soren's inherited memory immediately catalogued as worse than last month.
Sera Delacque stood by the window with her arms folded. She did not look over when the door opened. She had already known who it was.
"Finally." Vesper didn't look up either.
"The grain book. The stone book. The wages ledger, and I want the column at the back reconciled properly this time, not the way you did it in Frostmonth."
The way he did it in Frostmonth was correct and you couldn't read it because he didn't add extra summary notes.
"Yes, my lady."
He sat at the small side table where the previous Soren had sat two hundred times, and opened the grain book, and started working.
It took ten minutes to understand her business, which was longer than it should have taken, because it was worse than he expected.
Vesper Callowmere bought people cheaply, kept them until she stopped finding them interesting, and sold them on.
The house slaves she liked enough lived here.
Everyone else lived at the labour estate a mile east, working grain and stone, and those were the ones that actually made money, because a labourer worked, did not need paying and could not ask for leave.
Her margins were terrible.
Her margins were terrible because roughly a third of her sales were to her own relatives at inflated prices, which meant a third of her business was her family quietly handing her money and calling it commerce so that nobody had to say the word allowance out loud.
She knows, Soren thought, turning a page. She has to know. You can't look at these numbers and not know.
She just never adds them up in a row.
"Stop making that face."
He looked up. Vesper was watching him over the top of a letter.
"Pardon me, my lady?"
"The thinking one. You get it and then you find something." She waved the letter at him.
"What is it? Out with it, I've got Aldric on Wednesday night and I would rather find it myself than have him find it."
Aldric. Brother. The one that visits. Hmm wait she knows my faces? Then again it is why she bought me in the first place.
He could give her the small thing. Two shillings out on a wage column, a stone tally that didn't close. Hand her that, watch her feel clever, go back to being furniture.
Or
Loraine. Quick question. Does she sell me faster if I'm useful or slower?
<<Loraine: Slower. Obviously slower. A well kept ledger is worth more than a pretty face and she is not sentimental about either.>>
That's what I thought.
"The grain's short, my lady."
Vesper lowered the letter.
"What?"
"Your grain. Out of the labour estate." He turned the book around and pushed it across the desk, and did not apologise for reaching across her desk, which he noticed her notice.
"That's what leaves the estate. That's the weight your own overseer signs off. And that's what Vail's factor in Greyfen signs as received."
"Vail always signs low, he takes a—"
"He takes 2% for spoilage and moisture, it's in his contract yes." Soren tapped the column.
"That's not 2%. That's nine, going on eleven since Ashfall. Eleven percent, every load, every month, for fourteen months."
The room went quiet.
By the window, Sera Delacque had turned her head.
Vesper pulled the book toward her and looked at it. Her eyes moved along the column twice, and then a third time, and Soren watched her face change from irritation to something narrower and much less pleasant.
"That's four hundred and thirty crowns," she said.
"Four hundred and sixty one, my lady. There's the stone as well, but that's only being shorted about three percent, so either they're being careful with the stone or somebody different is doing the stone."
"You did this in ten minutes."
Soren kept his eyes at the correct height. "I've had a lot of practice."
Vesper sat back.
The look on her face was one that the previous Soren had catalogued extensively, and it meant she was about to be dangerous in a direction that had nothing to do with him, which was the safest thing she ever was.
"Corben Vail," she said, "Thinks he can short me?! A Callowmere?!?"
"He might not know, my lady," he said instead. "It could be the factor working on his own."
"Do you believe that?"
"...No"
"Neither do I." She flicked the letter aside.
"Sera. Wednesday's still Wednesday, so it can't be Wednesday. Friday. You'll take the cart to Greyfen and you'll stand in Vail's yard while they weigh, and you'll—"
"My...My lady...if I may?"
Vesper looked at him. Nobody interrupted Vesper.
Yet she didn't chastise him but rather looked at him with a faint surprise and confusion.
Soren felt the entire room tilt slightly, and made himself keep going, in the flattest, most small voice he owned.
"If you send Sera, they'll weigh it honestly, once, on the day she's standing there, and then they'll go back to nine percent when she comes back to her duty as your guard." He showed the stone book and pointed to a few fluctuations where the records matched what they were supposed to.
"You don't want one honest weighing. You want to know how they're doing it, so you can take the fourteen months back off them."
Silence.
Vesper's head tilted.
"And you'd know how find that?"
"No, my lady. But nobody looks at me." He said faintly.
"They'd talk in front of me. They talk in front of Marda's boy and he's twelve."
By the window, Sera Delacque said, very quietly, "He's not wrong."
It was, according to four years of inherited memory, the third full sentence she had spoken in Soren's presence.
Vesper drummed her fingers on the desk.
She looked between Sera and Soren for a few moments before closing her eyes to think.
"Fine," she said. "Friday. You go with the labour cart, you stand about looking stupid, you listen, and you come back and tell me exactly how they do it."
She pointed at him. "Get out. Take the wage ledger with you, it's a disgrace."
He got out.
He got to the bottom of the servants' stair, went out into the yard, stood behind the water butt where nobody could see him, and let out a breath that had been sitting in him for the entire conversation.
<<AWARD: 2 Uncommon Tickets, 1 Rare Ticket, 150 FP.>>
<<Qualifying: Manipulated a superior into an outcome she believes was her own. Well done.>>
<<Total FP: 1,150>>
<<Lilith: She let you talk back three times...And she didn't make Sera have your head...>>
She didn't like it. She's just very angry at somebody else for the first time in a while and I'm the one holding the shovel.
<<Lilith: Sure. Sure, sure.>>
Soren thought for moment and decided to look Lilith's side of the system. Lilith, shop.
<<Lilith: Ooh. Yes. About that.>>
The rose panel came up and it had gone dim at the edges, like a lamp with something wrong in the oil.
<<COVENANT SYSTEM: Degraded.>>
<<Lilith: So here's the thing and don't be dramatic about it. Your size...it's too small.>>
Excuse me?
<<Lilith: Hehe. Not an insult! Everyone's is, at your rank. A soul at Apprentice is about the size of a soup bowl and there are two of us in it. Loraine's the original tenant and I'm the one who climbed through the window, so guess which half is browning out.>>
Oh she meant my soul, though he was very sure she phrased it like that on purpose.
<<Loraine: She is understating it. Roughly 60% of her functions are offline.>>
<<Lilith: 62%, but who's counting.>>
What's offline?
<<Lilith: Covenants. The whole thing. That's my actual purpose, that's the bit that makes me REALLY worth having, and I can't do a single one until your soul's big enough to hold us both properly. Which should hopefully happen at Adept.>>
Adept. That's a full stage.
<<Loraine: Nine levels and a bottleneck.>>
What still works?
<<Lilith: Points still come in, I can still talk, and the shop's open but capped. Mortal and Refined grade only. Anything Profound or above just shows me the price but doesn't let me take it out.>>
Soren leaned his head back against the wall.
Fine. Refined's fine. Refined is a lot more than I had yesterday.
<<Lilith: That's the spirit! Also I want to say, and I mean this warmly, that the fastest way to grow a soul is—>>
I know what you're going to say.
<<Lilith: —is lots and lots of—>>
I know what you're going to say, Lilith.
<<Lilith: —cultivation. I was going to say cultivation. Wow. Look at where your head went. Loraine, look where his head went.>>
<<Loraine: I have been looking at where his head goes for two days and I would like to stop.>>