In that case.
What was the real plan?
We looked at each other,
and spoke at the same time.
“Deharmont.”
“Deharmont.”
&
“Lady Serafinlie.”
Serafinlie, who had been turning through the ledger, did not even raise her head.
“Speak.”
“The records for the supplementary delivery of military provisions to the Southern Second Storage Depot are slightly off.”
Scratch.
A page of the ledger turned.
“By how much?”
“Seventeen boxes.”
Seventeen boxes.
A number far too laughable to call a problem for Deharmont.
An error that could arise if a single clerk lost a night’s sleep.
Serafinlie did not stop the tip of her pen.
“The subcontractor?”
“The Selluan Company.”
“And the intermediate transport transfer?”
“The Tireless Porters Company.”
Still seeming unconcerned, Serafinlie tossed out her words.
“Fill the gap.”
“Pardon?”
“Make up the difference before there’s a commotion in the provinces.”
“Yes, understood.”
The clerk bowed his head and withdrew.
Scratch.
Another page of the ledger turned.
And before long, the door opened again.
“Lady Serafinlie. The eastern spice settlement statement is also a little strange.”
This time, the tip of her pen stopped for the briefest moment.
“What is it this time?”
“The payment is complete, but the storage transfer time is delayed by half a shijin.”
“Which companies?”
“The Serean Company and the Ravec Company.”
“Ravec?”
At that name, Serafinlie raised her head for the first time.
The Ravec Company had dealt with Deharmont for a long time.
They never stood out too much,
never grew too greedy,
and quietly took a moderate profit.
Even when a company like that made a mistake, there was a shape to it.
They were not the sort of company that would let a storage transfer time slip.
“The seal number?”
“It matches.”
“The receipt confirmation?”
“There is no formal issue.”
“Then pass it on.”
As the clerk left and the door closed,
silence settled for a moment.
Seventeen boxes.
Half a shijin.
Small discrepancies that could be made into a problem if one wished,
or covered over as much as one liked.
Such things appeared and vanished on ledgers every day.
And yet, because of the recent Infinite Carriage incident, the uneasiness would not leave her.
But these companies were old connections, unlike the Infinite Carriage Company.
That fact was trying to dull that uneasiness.
Rattle.
The door opened again.
This time, a clerk from the bill settlement office stumbled in as if about to fall.
“Lady Serafinlie!”
Serafinlie’s eyes narrowed.
“Breathe first. Then speak.”
“One of the northern military provisions bills has had its receipt put on hold!”
The fingers resting on the ledger stopped.
“By whom?”
“The Haron Company!”
This time, Serafinlie closed the ledger.
Tap.
At that small sound, the air in the office changed.
The Haron Company.
Those who would accept a bill stamped with the name Deharmont without a word.
And now such people had put receipt on hold.
It meant they needed confirmation.
And in the language of merchants, confirmation was always translated into one thing.
We do not trust you.
Deharmont.
“Haron, Ravec, Serean, Tireless Porters, Selluan.”
The clerk flinched.
“Yes?”
“Pull every recent transaction.”
Serafinlie rose from her chair.
“Military provisions, collateral, bills, storage transfers. Put everything on one sheet.”
“Yes!”
The clerk hurriedly bowed his head and ran out.
And.
From that moment on, the air in the Deharmont estate began to change little by little.
***
When night fell, the lights of the Deharmont estate were lit one by one.
Lamps burned in every window of the eastern annex,
and servants ran through the western corridors carrying candlesticks.
Bundles of ledgers were piled in the arms of clerks going up and down the stairs,
and low yet urgent voices continued everywhere in the corridors.
“Cross-check the southern tax receipts again!”
“Where is the original bill? Match it against the interim settlement sheet!”
“Who handled the warehouse seal records? Write down every hand they passed through!”
Shouts flew back and forth.
The sound of doors opening and closing continued without pause.
Ink smeared,
candle wax dripped,
and the corners of ledgers scraped palms.
The estate had certainly grown brighter,
but the faces of those inside were growing darker and darker.
Deharmont had always been like this.
When a problem arose, they moved faster.
Faster,
more precisely,
in greater numbers.
That was how this family had lived while holding the kingdom’s credit in its grasp.
But this time, the more they moved, the more strangely everything sank.
The ledgers were certainly piling up,
but the answer was not drawing nearer.
Rather, the more pages they turned, the more a stench rose from somewhere deeper.
“Lady Serafinlie.”
Three department heads entered the office all at once.
Serafinlie pushed aside the ledgers piled on one side of her desk and lifted her gaze.
“Speak.”
The first to open his mouth was the head of collateral.
“One more claim of identical collateral rights has come in.”
“From where?”
“The House of Baron Loenberg.”
“And the other party?”
“The House of Viscount Midern.”
Serafinlie’s eyes narrowed by the faintest degree.
Duplicate claims on collateral rights.
On a ledger, it was a one-line problem,
but in reality, it meant two nobles were claiming the same item as their own.
The first scent to rise when credit began to waver.
Greed.
Next was the head of military provisions settlement.
“A portion of the Central Army’s winter provisions has been confirmed short at the assembly point.”
“The intermediate receipt?”
“It matches.”
“The seals?”
“There is no formal issue.”
“Formal?”
Serafinlie’s gaze drove down coldly.
The department head wiped away cold sweat.
“On the books, everything matches.”
Lastly, the head of taxes spoke.
“The number of companies delaying receipt of southern advance-tax bills has increased to three.”
“Who?”
“Haron, Berto, and Renvail.”
“...”
Serafinlie closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them.
Now it was clear.
This was not an accident of instinct.
Someone outside Deharmont knew the very way it breathed,
and was choking off that breath all at once.
“Gather the flow of company connections for the past year.”
“Pardon?”
“Every place whose name has come up just now.”
“Yes!”
Once the order fell, the estate began to move even faster.
They tied military provisions and bills into a single line,
connected collateral and company transport flows,
and placed storage transfers and temporary payment confirmations on the same chart.
The clerks ran.
One nearly missed his footing on the stairs and almost fell,
while another burned the back of his hand trying to warm ink that had gone cold.
A servant running with a ledger collided with another clerk at the corner of a corridor and scattered papers everywhere.
And yet not a single person could stop.
Because the moment they stopped,
it felt as though something still unidentified would come pushing into the estate.
***
By the time midnight drew near.
The list of company connections had piled up before Serafinlie.
The Tireless Porters Company.
The Serean Company.
The Ravec Company.
The Haron Company.
The Berto Company.
The Renvail Company.
None of the names were unfamiliar.
Rather, they were too familiar.
They had traded with Deharmont for a long time,
and though there had occasionally been small problems, they had always been ones that could be handled.
And now such people were suddenly surfacing all at once?
It was strange.
She examined the names again.
Haron in military provisions.
Ravec in storage transfers.
Serean in temporary transport.
Tireless Porters in randomly assigned goods.
Berto in payment-hold sections.
Renvail in intermediate receipt confirmations.
Each occupied a different place.
Yet they meshed together with an eerie lack of gaps.
At that moment, Serafinlie’s hand stopped.
“...Ah.”
It was not intuition.
She was beginning to see it.
The moment when dots that had been scattered like coincidence
connected into a single line.
Problems overlooked because they belonged to trusted companies.
Discrepancies patched up and passed over because they were minor.
Over the past year,
each of those had been leaving an extremely thin scratch on the wall called Deharmont from their own position.
Each scratch, on its own, was not even noticeable.
But if they occurred in the correct order, the story changed.
Serafinlie pulled the ledgers closer.
Order.
The truth was not in the numbers, but in the order.
On the day military provisions wavered,
the bills stopped.
The moment the bills stopped,
a request for confirmation entered the tax flow.
When the tax flow was blocked,
the companies began to reconsider credit guarantees.
And in that gap, even duplicate collateral claims sprang out.
Ordinarily, even if one thing wavered, another should have supported it.
Deharmont’s structure had been built that way.
If military provisions were delayed, bills supported them,
if bills shook, collateral held firm,
and if collateral wavered, the tax flow restored balance.
But this time was different.
The things that should have supported one another were, on the same day,
in the same time frame,
doubting one another.
Serafinlie’s fingertips went cold.
This had not been a crude shaking from the outside.
Someone had seen Deharmont’s ledgers.
No.
It was not as simple as having seen the ledgers.
In what order Deharmont covered errors.
Which flow stood by trusting which other flow.
When one thing collapsed, what they used to endure it.
They knew all of that.
To a degree impossible unless they knew, in detail, which company reached which flow.
Yes, this was something only those who inherited Deharmont’s blood could see,
something no one could know unless they saw the ledgers.
Anyone could steal a glance at the numbers inside a ledger.
But the order was different.
When those numbers moved,
where they became blocked,
and at what moment Deharmont reacted the slowest—
no one could know that without knowing the inside of this family.
Bang!
The door flew open as if it were about to break.
“Lady Serafinlie!”
The head of the warehouses entered, his face deathly pale.
“Information has leaked that a Central Army messenger may move!”
The office froze.
“And there is news that the royal investigators have also suddenly begun to act.”
Central Army.
Royal investigators.
The moment those two words were joined,
this was no longer something Deharmont could handle internally.
Those words meant, in other words,
that the entire kingdom was beginning to suspect them.
“And...”
The department head swallowed dryly.
“The two nobles claiming collateral rights are insisting on entering the estate.”
“Who?”
“Baron Loenberg and Viscount Midern.”
Just then, another person appeared behind him and shouted.
“The representative from the Haron Company has arrived as well! It seems the others will arrive soon too!”
Serafinlie closed her eyes, then opened them.
The fingertips resting on the list had stiffened coldly.
Someone
had released a terribly vicious poison.
Into Deharmont.
From a very long time ago.
Very slowly.
From the outside, a very small poison,
and the moment they could see inside, they thrust in a poison viciously powerful.
Who was it?
She could not see.
Who could have arranged something like this?
She could see neither their face
nor their purpose.
This unknown opponent
seemed like a monster so vast that even she dared not glimpse its form.
Serafinlie slowly opened her mouth.
“Summon everyone.”
“Pardon?”
“The heads of company connections, military provisions, collateral, bills, and taxes. All of them.”
“Yes!”
They ran through the corridors again.
Suddenly, Serafinlie looked out at the corridor beyond her office.
People were still running there.
Some clutching ledgers,
some carrying sealed boxes,
some with faces gone white as they braced themselves against the wall.
The estate was still intact.
The high pillars,
the red carpets,
the portraits hanging on the walls.
All of it remained as it had been.
Deharmont had not yet collapsed.
Nor was it a family that would collapse easily.
Her father, the head of Deharmont, would even now be moving somewhere to stop this situation.
There was the money he had sown throughout his lifetime.
That money was power,
and power was strength.
Strength that reached even the royal palace.
But Serafinlie knew.
A crisis that could be blocked with money,
and a crisis that could not be blocked with money, were different things.
This was not an attack meant to steal Deharmont’s money.
It was an attack meant to tear apart the belief
that Deharmont could move money.
And credit—
once torn,
would not return to its original shape no matter how many gold coins were poured into it.