Brightly Burning

tension had poisoned relationships throughout the area.

The Trainees knew all of this, and that a solution to the puzzle had been found. Their teacher had given them a great deal of background, and the last bit of physical evidence: the account books.

The account books were passed from hand to hand, and each of the four students had a chance to examine them carefully. Lan had noted something awry, and he wondered if any of the others had.

'I checked the addition, and he hadn't made any mistakes there,' said Tuck, scratching his head. 'That was the first thing that I thought of, that'd he'd just been bad at arithmetic.'

'Anyone else?' Artero was physically very like an older version of Tyron, which had rather put Lan off at first, but his personality could not possibly have been more different. Artero never sneered, never was anything other than intense and earnest. When he was excited about what he was teaching, his eyes positively glowed. 'Lavan, you took a long time over those pages. Did you see anything in them to give you a clue?'

Lan hesitated a moment, then reminded himself that the case was long over, and presumably had been solved correctly. Nothing he said would make any trouble for anyone now. 'The addition was right—it was the numbers that were wrong,' he said at last. 'No one dealing in small items like spices ever makes a bargain that ends in round numbers like that. And I think that some of those debits might have been too low, but I don't know enough about foodstuffs to tell for sure.' The merchant in question had trafficked in spices and dried or preserved fruits; not exactly Lan's area of expertise. But he did recall vividly going with his mother to the market as a small child, and her spirited bargaining over every clipped copper coin.

'Were the numbers altered in any way?' ventured another Trainee, a girl named Mona. 'Could someone besides the widow have taken money? Or did someone alter the books to make trouble for the widow?'

'No, to all three questions—and I have a set of altered books to show you some of the common ways in which documents can be changed, and how you can tell, but we'll get to that in a moment.' Artero smiled at Lan encouragingly. 'Now I'll draw on our newest student's experiences with merchants and traders, and ask Lavan if he can think of a possible scenerio that would suit the evidence.'

Lan thought very hard, and something else popped up in his memory. The widow, who had been as sharp as she was pretty, was a merchant herself, crafting jewelry in silver and gems, and as such, had been meticulous in making certain that she was not wedding into a failing business. It had taken her elderly suitor a long time to persuade her that her own earnings would not be used to support his trade. In fact, the match was as much a business transaction as a marriage, as was often the case among tradesmen and merchants. Surely she would have checked the books before signing the marriage contract!

On the other hand—much to the son's anger—the spice merchant had been totally besotted with his much younger bride. He had been courting her for three years, and had brought her to the marriage after many gifts, assidious attention, and many sincere love letters. They hadn't been married more than a couple of months when the old man died. The son had even accused the widow of murdering his father for the inheritance, until it transpired that the old man's will made him the heir to the lion's share of the ready cash, and his wife the heir to the house and goods. Neither house nor goods would have been of any use at all to the son.

'The dead man probably had two sets of books, this one on paper and one either hidden, or in his head,' Lan said at last. 'The books we looked at were created to make his business look a lot more prosperous than it really was, so the girl he was courting would marry him. So the money wasn't missing, it was never there in the first place.'

The other Trainees looked at him with surprise and some skepticism, but Artero slowly nodded, his smile broadening. 'And why didn't our widow notice this in the first place?' he asked.

'Because she's a jeweler; they always deal in round numbers, and the finished piece is always worth a whole lot more than the components.' Now that he knew he was right, Lan was a great deal more certain of his answers. 'It's like a piece of tapestry. The colored thread is worth next to nothing compared to the finished piece. What you're paying for is the talent and ability of the artist who made it.' A speculation occurred to him, and he went ahead and voiced it. 'She worked by herself, so her income was pretty irregular, I bet—nothing until she finished a commission, then a lump sum. She would have been wanting a husband with a steady income, and she wouldn't have known what to look out for in his books, because they were nothing like hers. I bet all she did was check out the addition to make sure he wasn't a shoddy accountant.'

Artero slowly stood up and bowed to Lan, who flushed with momentary pride. 'Very, very good, Lavan. That is exactly what happened; it took the Herald in question a lot more time to ferret the answers out, but that is what finally came to light when he backtracked the suppliers and compared their accounts with the old man's. So the widow was exonerated, and the son had to go home disappointed in his inheritance, but at least certain that he was not cheated out of it. There was even a relatively happy ending; the village settled down, and everyone made up their differences.' He turned to the other members of the class. 'Now you see why I say it is as important to know about the lives of those who come to us for a judgment as it is to know the bare facts of the case.'

He pulled a ledger out of his bookcase and laid it open in front of them with a smile. 'Now, here is an artificial set of account pages that have been altered. We've got a sample of every sort of alteration we've ever seen in here. I'll show you where and how they were altered.'

Lan leaned over the pages with as much eagerness as the rest; he had always known that figures and handwriting could be changed or forged, but he had never seen any examples. And some were truly ingenious; Artero made it clear that they would be spending a great deal of time on these examples, and Lan was not at all averse to that. There was enough there to occupy him for the next couple of moons, not just the fortnight that Artero promised.

For the first time, classes were teaching him something interesting, not all his classes, of course, and he wasn't doing any better than average in most of them, but at least they weren't an ordeal anymore. When he had problems, if the Herald in charge of the class didn't help him, one of the other Trainees would, often volunteering to help him before he asked for it. He hadn't understood that until Tuck explained it to him; they weren't in competition for the best place and the teacher's accolades, they were supposed to cooperate. They got better marks for cooperating. In fact, in some classes, no one moved up until they could all move up together.

'We've got to work together; there just aren't enough of us to take care of all the problems,' Tuck had said earnestly. 'You can't hold back something that another Herald needs to know just to make yourself look good—that only makes all the Heralds look bad. People have to know that one Herald is going to be able to do just as good a job as another, or they won't trust us.'

This was one of those classes in which all the participants moved up as a group, and Lan loved it. He learned such fascinating things in it, not only from Herald Artero, but from the other Trainees.

When the class was over, Tuck intercepted him on the way to the kitchen; he was one of the servers at