Ash 44, 122
The OIR Building
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It was two hours past time to begin work, and Valentin Valentin… was not in the office. You’d have been hard-pressed to tell, from an outsider’s perspective- in the years since he’d attained his post at the OIR, the study in the small suite of rooms he still held on the Valentin estate had convergently evolved, becoming more and more like his work furnishings..
He found it easier that way, really. Wake up in the morning, dress and preen, breakfast on the veranda and then walk into his study before Traversing the slipspace to his office. An easy transition. Indeed, he had a theory that one could make such trips more easily between rooms which were… akin, in some fashion. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, if his study and office were truly as one, there would be no need to spend aether at all.
Not that his old professors would have thought much of the notion. And it was, after all, just a flight of fancy.
All this to say that his study had most of the same amenities as his office, down to the drinks cabinet and the grandfather clock. He’d even gotten the clock from the same damn clockmaker, just for the verisimilitude. This work all led to little enough fruit, other than his ease of transport and peace of mind, but it was handy for those times when he wanted to begin his work early or late, and required extra privacy. After all, he wasn’t the only person with a key to his office in the OIR.
And there was nothing more dangerous than being surprised… during a surprise inspection.
~~~
To begin with, Valentin cleaned his study.
This might seem like an improper use of work time, but it was essential to optimal performance of the review. He was not blessed with the sorcery of perception which would allow one to simply scrutinize a person and understand them implicitly; he was going to need to actually make observations. This necessitated more time away from his body, and the more orderly his surroundings while his spirit wandered, the less difficult the return.
He dusted the shelves, and his desk, and carefully polished all of the wooden surfaces surrounding the space before getting to work. He took another moment to pick up and put back a number of the books on his shelves, too- not to re-order them (they were, naturally, in perfect order) but simply to reassert that they had been placed intentionally. His pens were unrolled onto a linen cloth on the table, then given a cursory polish. Each light sconce was also wet and wiped down, to eliminate dimming.
Once that was all done and Valentin had given the entire office a last once-over for his own satisfaction, he settled down on his chair, then spread a heavy blanket over his body, a cloth containing small weighted balls intended to paralyze the restless sleeper. With his body thus mildly restrained, Valentin settled back into the chair and closed his eyes.
And though he did not reopen them, yet he saw.
~~~
Astral projection is an art seldom associated with the practitioners of Traversion, even though the magic of the Rune is commonly used to achieve it. Crystal seer stones, mirrors and other such objects were runeforged with the aid of a Traverser, as their art was best-fitted to free the senses from the confines of space and set it free.
So did Valentin float, in spectral form, above his family estate. His spirit divested of flesh, movement was more akin to thought than action- as he focused on the northern districts, his perspective changed and his astral form followed suit. He glanced down over himself, habitually checking to determine that translucent limbs, more aetheric constructs than anything else, were visible. He’d never quite grasped what the rules were, there. Most onlookers, observing an astral body, professed to see nothing, but acted somewhat differently. Some people, approached thusly, would scream of ghosts at once.
(He’d been thoroughly counseled against using astral spycraft against any fellow mages, as his incorporeal spirit was vulnerable to a veritable hodgepodge of mystical effects. He wouldn’t complain about that. It wasn’t as though he was qualified to inspect a wizard’s tower for defects anyway.)
His first target for surprise inspection was a bakery. Not of the sort familiar to the lesser kingdoms of Karnor, though; this was an enterprise, a million pounds of flour baking inside a great stone building, serviced by hundreds of sweating workers. He touched down among them, silent and unobserved, and floated between each piece of equipment and stack of crates, inspecting them in turn.
"One… two… four… seven…"
Silent as he was invisible, Valentin counted out the crowds of men and women (and children, for the youth were popular hires for certain parts of the assembly-line). He had no notebook as a ghost, but he was thoroughly capable of memorizing figures, and, what’s more, extrapolating from them.
"...thirty-three. Thirty three in the first hall, two other halls of similar size, that’s about a hundred. Twenty overseers to go around, ten administrators on top, that means there should be seventy drivers."
The company had reported 244 workers on their last return, but that number might have gone up or down by thirty since the filing. If his figures were right, the report could be just about accurate, assuming they had a lot of people on delivery or stock. He could have investigated the matter further, but this was enough to pass them- the point was simply to see if they were wildly off in one direction or another, not to expend his valuable time and energy on a complete headcount.
He took a moment, too, to review the faces of the workers. Mostly human, mostly of Geleriand ethnic stock. He didn’t personally care if an industrial bakery employed immigrants or minority races, but it was a tax matter, after all.
Finally, Valentin slipped through the great bakery halls, counting the number of wheeled racks containing freshly-baked loaves or rising dough, and tallying the ovens roaring. It looked like only ten ovens were operative across the three halls, which was a serious decrease from what they’d reported two years ago. This had no tax implication, so Valentin took it as a sign that the bakery was having difficulty selling enough bread to keep all the lines open.
He made a note of that. It wouldn’t go in the official file, but knowing that a major bakery was struggling for business was the sort of detail which could prove helpful later.
Thus satisfied, he disappeared- or disappeared to the extent that he had really been there at all, anyway. The bakery was in nominal tolerance, and would never know that the questioning eyes of the state had been reviewing their affairs.
~~~
The next target was something of a rare treat; a market stall in the wintergarten.
As a rule, there was no point in sending OIC resources to audit a stall. They were low-value propositions which would lie and cheat and confess to everything in a shake-down, but go back to lawless behavior the moment you left the market. No, better just to shake down the people they rented from, who could extract the Imperium’s pound of flesh more effectively, and overlook the day-to-day.
This, though, was something special. It was Endergarten’s, a stall the size of any reputable shop which operated in the open air only because of the atmosphere of the marketplace (or so Endergarten himself claimed). This was a fresh catch market like many smaller stalls, but advertised itself as having the highest quality of fish, as well as delicacies imported from across Karnor and kept on ice.
Valentin started with the headcount–sixteen salespeople–but quickly moved on to the more interesting sport of spying on the back rooms. Though the stall was “open air”, all of the fish were kept in a wooden storehouse, which bore a number of charms warding it against flies and heat both. Inside, Valentin espied a particularly nice cerulean dragonshard, which he expected was inset in some scrivening to keep the interior at a chill.
He popped in anyway. None of the wards did anything against astral intruders, and he had neither blood to freeze nor nerves to feel it.
It was mostly just a large shed with a lot of shelves, fish piled on them atop wooden platforms. There was also a strangely ornate series of closed drawers which, when he gathered himself enough to peek through the side, seemed to contain more fish. Something deeply unsettling about keeping fish inside a chest of drawers like that, but unfortunately it did not violate the law as yet.
Valentin wandered out of the cold storage, satisfied by the contents. This was the way of most random surprise inspections. While many people regularly violated the law in little ways and many people made small mistakes while providing the government with information, few were acting with the sort of fraudulent intent which would be required to turn up a serious tax matter. The majority of such inspections were passes; if they had been doing anything wrong, the OIR would probably have heard about it already.
He stopped by the back of the tent operation before leaving, where Herr Endergarten was in the middle of a dither with one of his sources. Again, the OIR reviewer did not suspect he’d find evidence of foul play, but sometimes snippets of conversation could be useful regardless.
“...says to him that we’ve had to go further and further north on account of the bloody greenskins.”
The speaker had a distinctive Zaichaeri accent, and was wearing a loose ornament around his neck which Valentin thought was supposed to be a proof against hexes, which placed him as either a recent immigrant from the east or just a stubborn one. His garb was uniformly Gelerian.
“So what does this bloody captain do? Go on and guess, I’ll reckon you can’t.”
“I couldn’t even imagine.” responded Mr. Endergarten. The large stall-owner sounded genuinely sympathetic, but the man was famously affable. He would probably sound sympathetic while stabbing someone to death.
“The ponce takes us further south. Further south, can you believe it? We was already well outside the safe zone for raids outta Cathena, and now this? I swear, some nights I thought I could hear Hullbreaker itself rollin’ around in the depths below.”
“Ah, that’s terrible.” Mr. Endergarden seemed to commiserate, but Valentin suspected that he made his money with top-end clients off the fruits of captains willing to risk themselves and crew like that. “But at least you made out like a pirate yourself, eh? Pay not bad?”
“Well, no, not as such…”
Increased activity of enemy fleets in the southern seas? Sadly, Valentin could hardly count that as a win from his little scouting here. He’d seen the official reports saying as much for three seasons gone.
Bored now by the fishmonger’s chatter, Valentin’s spirit departed.
~~~
Several more visits passed in similar faction. Valentin walked around, he counted things, he made mental notes, and he listened in on a private conversation or two. Only one of the businesses came up red in his accounting, meriting a formal audit later, and that was over a fairly innocuous matter; the liquor on their shelves was wrong for the kind of sales licenses they held. It would be a matter of raking the owner over the coals for a few copper coins here and there, but a law unenforced would die of neglect.
And Valentin was an attentive gardener when it came to law.
The final stop of the night was maybe the second-largest of the businesses he’d been set to audit, just a bit smaller than the industrial baker he’d touched things off with. This was the Kornblume Glassworks, a factory affair which sat uncomfortably close to the Gash, which gave the entire building an uncomfortable air. At least, Valentin imagined that was why everything seemed so grim.
The business had two components- a shop selling specialized glass merchandise and serving as a pick-up place for other merchants seeking large-scale orders of glassware, and the factory itself. Valentin gave the shop a cursory inspection, then moved on.
The factory interior was much less cute, and much less clean. Glassworks were habitually stained with soot from the furnaces and kilns, and this one was (if anything) worse than the average. A handful of red-faced gaffers blew at the furnaces on the far side of the room, but most of the floor was populated with lehr boys, crack-off boys and mold boys,
That was much in evidence here, but while the workers at a glassworks were called “boys” regardless of age, most of the workers in this room really were children. The girls worked at inspection, turning the finished glass over and sanding or polishing it a bit before packing the mass-produced work into crates of straw.
It all seemed in order, but there was something uncomfortable about the business, which Valentin did not like. The faces of the children were not focused, but blank. Hopeless, really.
Well, nothing illegal about unhappy children. Valentin continued his rounds and counting for a few minutes before a bell rang out. The children–moving slowly, as they tried to adjust their joints after sitting or standing in uncomfortable poses for long hours–came to attention and lined up in front of a door. After a minute, it opened, revealing a thin woman with a severe mouth and green eyes. She looked the lot up and down, then announced:
“Filthy, filthy, filthy. Not one of you ever learns to keep clean. ‘S what ended your fathers in prison or the mines, no doubt. Come on, you’ll all need to wash. It’s a fast day, no supper ‘til morning.”
It was hard to tell if the mood fell; it was already like the Pit of Despair on that factory floor, but the children shuffled in after her. Valentin could see a shabbily-appointed set of dormitories beyond.
”Boarding-home for orphans?" Valentin mused. It was no orphanage, there didn’t seem to be one child there below working age. ”Foster house, perhaps. Put to work in the glassworks…"
There was nothing illegal about putting children to work like that. After all, they were your children, to do with as you pleased. But as Valentin returned through the Astral to his slumbering body, slipping uncomfortably into his own skin as one might a too-tight waistcoat, he couldn’t help but feel as though something was actually very wrong at the Kornblume Glassworks.
”None of my business." Valentin told himself. His teeth felt odd in his mouth, after spending so much time without. He went through his stack of papers, jotting down notes and marking each one.
Pass. Pass. Pass.
Fail.
Pass. Pass. Pass.
As he went to write “Pass” on the Kornblume’s sheet, however, his hand spasmed- another after-effect of the extended time outside his own flesh. He bent down to pick up the pen and straightened up, staring at the unassuming paper on his desk. He thought about what he should write.
”...tired. Not a young man, any more. I’ll write this one tomorrow."
Valentin stood, repositioning his chair, and turned off each light in turn. As he closed the creaky door leading to the simulacrum of his office, only one sound was audible within.
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