Reviews And Revelations
Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2023 10:36 pm
Ash 17, 123
Office of Imperial Revenue
Tick-tock
Tick-tock
Tick-tock
Often, Valentin Valentin would work overtime, both on his own projects and on ordinary business. He had a reputation to maintain, and few would challenge him on it; even outside of the OIR, he was known as a serious and humorless bureaucrat.
Today, however, he was working early, long before the bright-but-heatless sun arose. This was somewhat rarer; it was possible to be both an early riser and a night owl, of course, but unwise to make a habit of it if one suffered from the mortal need to sleep. In rare circumstances, though…?
”Tricky…" the auditor said softly, pursing his lips. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking aloud, but this particular line of research… well, you’d have to be daft not to get a little nervous about it. And Valentin was many things, but he was neither daft nor careless.
That’s because the records he was studying now–in rows of leather-bound books, both huge industrial tomes and small bound volumettes–were the annual reports from the Duchy of Dardouen, marked by the household seal of His Grace Louis Beaumont himself. Not that Valentin was investigating the Duke, of course.
(He hoped.)
Dardouen was the breadbasket of the Imperium, an absolutely vital holding for which a full accounting was needed… but it was also, well, the boonies. Even proximity to the glories of Gel’Grandal had not encouraged Valensier to really engage with the new world of magitechnology and science.
That meant that shipping through the center of the Empire was slow, it meant that the nobles of the farmlands ruled their own holdings as though they were feudal lords rather than civilized folk, and it meant that the accounts of businesses throughout the province were as clear and quick to be updated as mud. The Lorestone relays were all in working order, of course, for the Palace would not abide an informational void in the heart of the Imperium, but the OIR could get required records months after it had achieved full compliance within Gelerand.
It was, in short, the perfect place to hide a series of financial crimes.
Valentin flipped through the books, fairly stumped. What he knew from the ghost, and from the book of records which the ghost had revealed, was that a very large sum of money had been stolen, and stolen by way of bloody murder. And that should have been enough. If a rich woman had died in Dardoun in the last two years, it would be reflected in the news, in her estate’s processing, in transferring of loans and creditors and a thousand other things.
The death of a person was a bit like the death of a fish in the sea. Every fish that died fed something else; a small fish fed another fish, a larger fish fed several. Wealth on the scale the ledger hinted at should have been a veritable whalefall, building its own ecosystem of claimants and creditors and distant cousins all showing up in the hopes of making off with some piece of unearned wealth, of profiting off another’s misfortune for no cost to themselves.
But the broader records reflected… nothing. Someone had done a very thorough job in making sure that it wasn’t possible to see from the provincial documents that they’d struck gold.
”Fine; have it your way." the lawyer told his records books, coldly, ”There’s more than one way to skin a cat."
~~~
The first step was to figure out who had died, really.
Valentin had seen a figure that night in the archives, but it was indistinct. Not surprising. Ghosts were little more than fragments of the human id, conglomerations of loose aether and rapidly-disintegrating will. Probably the specter had forgotten what she looked like fairly rapidly. Pictures wouldn’t help.
If she’d lost a fortune, however, she must have begun with one. A review of the coroner’s reports from Dardouen throughout the last two years, however, revealed no wealthy heiresses, no matrons. It was almost enough to make Valentin doubt his conclusions on identity altogether, until he hit upon a simple explanation: the decedent had never been reported dead.
That was a devilishly cunning ruse, if he was right. It was not a particularly easy thing, to steal a fortune from a dead woman, once the probate courts were involved. There would be attorneys for every interested party, possibly a dozen or more potential heritors; the Duke himself might take an interest in the matter, depending on who it was. The estate process was designed from the bottom-up to make sure each interested claimant checked the excesses of the others, to avoid the possibility that someone could simply snag the winnings and vanish in the night.
But if the dead woman were still, legally, alive, then whoever nominally controlled her affairs controlled her entire fortune. So that switched the question from “who died with this much money” to “which women in Dardouen are still alive with this much money?”
It was not an extensive list.
~~~
The investigator spent the next few days finding excuses to visit the archives, bringing back up to his office each time one or two new volumes which were of no real consequence to his actual job. Census registers, county tax ledgers and investment reporting... all contributed to the list he was building quietly, while the city slept. He sat behind his desk until his legs numbed and his fingers ached from the scribbling and began to chafe with irritation at the regular exposure to rough parchment.
Once Valentin had finished combing the vaults for names, he had perhaps a dozen candidates, mostly matrons or matriarchs of significant families; a few younger ladies, who had taken over the family fortunes in unfortunate circumstances. He’d also made notes of their companions and compatriots- assorted hangers-on and family who might be motivated to dispose of their own patrons and take their places.
But this was still a lot to investigate in person. If he showed up in the Duchy and knocked on this many doors, word would spread. The OIR was well used to it; if you began to poke about in the affairs of one conspirator, not only would their co-conspirators take steps to hide and disappear, assorted persons at the periphery whom the agent wasn’t even really interested in would begin to clam up.
No, he needed to get this down to fewer. Five or six, and that at the very most. Two or three would be even better.
He began his process of elimination, striking two names because they belonged to people with high-profile positions. Even if they were somehow being… puppeted, he supposed, illusion or flesh animated by necromancy, the mages with whom they had regular association would be certain to find them out. No, it was simply too unlikely that it could be them.
Next, Valentin went to the news, skimming the Lorestone relays for major appearances. Those couldn’t completely rule out a suspect–after all, there were ways to make a dead person put on a public showing–but anyone who showed up too frequently was not a likely candidate. Four more of the women proved themselves alive by this method.
Down to six. Could he halve that?
~~~
The next few days were spent sending discreet inquiries to contacts in the Duchy, making sure not to give out any information which could tip his hand. Valentin had various ways- lorestone relays, of course, but also traditional post by train, or through Windows opened into the backrooms of people who he'd previously relied upon to help him indict others in the past. They had good reason not to talk to others about his contacts, after all, lest they be known as ones who had squealed in the past.
”Has anyone seen her in public of late?" he inquired of one.
”Has she sent for her medicines in the last three months?" he asked another.
”What form did the order take? In person, or is it always written?"
Day after day, the lawyer ground his six suspects down. Each additional lead came at the cost of an exponentially increasing number of calls and days, to the point where he feared he could not help but tip his hand early. Even though the letters didn't come from him, he began to regret posting each one, worried that some clever spy would end up putting it all together before ever he'd set foot in the Duchy's confines.
But… sure as dawn turned to day turned to dusk, six turned to five, turned to four. And then, at the last, there were three.
Three.
~~~
Valentin packed his bags and bought his train ticket early, not bothering to hide his movements. He was never going to hide the fact that he’d visited the Duchy, but that alone would never be enough to arouse suspicion in the months and weeks to come.
The train station in Gel'Grandal was... ornate. It ought to be; Valentin knew how much it had cost the government. It was thought to be money well-spent, though. The Imperium relied chiefly upon the impression of its wealth, prestige, and technological prowess, and a central train station could convey all of those things at once, to many thousands of people per day. Stepping onto the platform, surrounded by opulent sculpture, advanced systems and towering architecture created both a sense of security in he individual and a trust in the ultimate power of the nation.
He didn't feel powerful just now, though. Like so many things in the Imperium, these ornate walls were a façade, an expensive illusion created to disguise a more essential poverty at the center of the nation. It was mirrored in every one of the homes on Northside, in Valentin's own estate. And he now knew, somewhere in the Duchy of Dardouen, there was someone playing the same game but backwards- hiding vast wealth behind the appearance of regularity, of business-as-usual.
Well, one way or another, someone's illusions were going to be broken soon.
When the time came, he stepped onto the train with his light luggage, a list of three names clutched in one begloved hand. It was time… to investigate.