horses, wagons, voices raised as the Qin guardsmen went about their morning duties on the other side of the high wall. The door to the counting room was on the left, and while before it had simply slid open and closed like all the other doors in this part of the world, now those doors had been replaced by a locked and barred door that opened on hinges like a gate. One of the soldiers standing guard lifted away the bars so Mai and Priya could cross into the office. As the door was opened, Mai heard O'eki scolding a young clerk.
'This is the accounts book we use for all shipments pertaining to the building of the mistress's household in Astafero. This is the accounts book used for expenses pertaining to this compound.
The two compounds are accounted separately, not together! Now, you'll have to go back over the entire last month and divide the expenses out properly. Hu!'
The big slave nodded to acknowledge their presence.
The scolded clerk murmured a barely audible greeting.
Another clerk, even younger, blushed and stammered. 'G-G-Greetings of the day, Mistress.' Hu! The poor girl's head was shaven, and her thin face would have benefited from the softening ornament of hair.
'Sit down,' Mai said, hoping she sounded gracious as the clerk brushed at the stubble on her head as if she had guessed Mai's thoughts. Eiya! Judging a young woman by looks alone was the kind of thing her mother and aunt would have done! Beauty was all very well, but Mai was painfully aware that if Anji had been a cruel man, then her beauty would have brought her tears rather than joy. She attempted a smile; the clerk groped for her brush and, having picked it up, set it down again immediately, thoroughly intimidated. Mai sighed. 'O'eki, show me the books.'
Three lamps burned although it was day; there were only two windows that could be opened in the long room, one at each end and both set with grilles. The door into the warehouse was closed, but they received light through the porch door, which had been left propped open because the captain's wife was inside. The customers' door, leading into the warehouse, was closed and locked. So much was closed and locked!
The scolded clerk hunched his shoulders as Mai looked over his shoulder.
'Those are very clear entries,' she said. 'Very readable.'
O'eki grunted impatiently. 'Yes, but not all in the right place. You see this lumber, marked to this account when it should be here, while the settlement account has been debited with this purchase of dye stuffs.' He pulled a counting frame over and flicked wooden beads so quickly their colors blurred. 'Just on this page alone you have two hundred and forty leya misaccounted.'
'Are you going to send me back to the temple?' The clerk looked so young! Although, Mai thought, he was probably no younger than she was herself.
'If you fix this properly and make, no further mistakes, I'll know you are learning,' said O'eki. The lad nodded gratefully as the other clerk looked on, with her face pulled into an almost
comically anxious expression. 'Lass, you double-check the spare ledgers against the main set.'
As the clerks bent back to their labors, Mai drew O'eki aside, over to the long drawers where Anji kept a set of maps. She opened the top drawer, in which lay a detailed drawing of the city of Olossi, how it nestled on bedrock in a bend in the river, how its streets climbed the hill toward Fortune Square, how its inner and outer walls separated the city into an upper and lower town.
'Where did these two clerks come from?' she whispered.
'The temple of Sapanasu. It's the only place I can hire clerks, Mistress. It's the custom here, to hire your accounts keepers from the temple. But these two are very inexperienced.'
'Their numbers and ideograms are very readable.'
He laughed, and both young clerks, startled, looked up from their books and self-consciously down again. 'One thing I will say for that Keshad. He might have been arrogant and temperamental, but he kept excellent accounts.'
Mai closed the drawer and opened the one below it, whose lines described the region surrounding the Olo'o Sea, as much as the Qin scouts and Anji could describe of it. Past the town of Old Fort the road pushed into the foothills and thence higher up into the mountains here called the Spires. Precise handwriting that she recognized as Anji's had inscribed 'Kandaran Pass' above the village named Dast Korumbos; at the edge of the map where the pass sloped away south and west, the same hand had written 'Sirniaka.'
That way lay the empire, whose red hounds still hunted Anji. He would always be in danger from that direction.
'I wonder how Keshad is doing,' Mai murmured. 'Will he and Eliar be able to spy out information in the empire?'
Priya had come up beside them. 'I wonder if they are still alive.'
'The empire is a terrible place,' murmured Mai. 'If Anji's half brother is now emperor, and has killed all his other brothers and half brothers, then he will not want Anji alive, even if Anji has no intention of claiming the Sirniakan throne. And there are other claimants, too. These cousins, sons of Anji's father's younger brother. How can I keep track of them all?' A few tears ran down her cheeks. She wiped them away. 'How clever of Anji to label his maps with a script no one in the Hundred but he and Priya can read.'
'You are reading it now, Mistress,' said Priya with the smile she offered only to Mai or O'eki.
'I am learning.' She gestured toward a table. 'I'll sit here for a while. O'eki, maybe that young woman will sit with me and review the ideograms. I want to be able to write my own accounts book in the Hundred style.'
The girl's name was Adit, and she had been born in the Year of the Ox, just like Mai, but she was a timid creature, hard to draw out, so after a while Mai concentrated on forming and memorizing the ideograms. Priya and O'eki had seated themselves together at a writing desk, heads bent intimately together as they discussed an unknown matter in low voices, hands touching.
A guard stepped in, glanced around, and stepped out. Sheyshi entered, carrying a fussing Atani.
'I'll nurse him over here,' said Mai as she took the baby to the far end of the room where pillows were stacked for visitors. Atani was an efficient eater, very hungry but not one to dawdle. When he was done and she had burped him, Adit crept over and shyly asked if she could hold him, for it transpired she had left a beloved infant brother at home when she went to the temple. So then she could be coaxed to speak of her home and her family in northern Olo'osson, and when Mai at length had Sheyshi take the infant out, she and Adit settled back to work companionably, trading comments, chuckling over an awkward stroke, asking and answering questions. Eventually the lad rose and, in the course of stretching and straightening his already neat jacket, paused by the table where the two young women worked.
'That's just the basic work,' he said in the tone lads got when they were showing off for girls. 'Those ideograms are the old way of recording. Anyone can do that. That's why the clerks of Sapanasu keep them around, because even merchants who didn't apprentice with the Lantern can tally with numbers and ideograms. Writing is much harder.'
'Don't try to boast, Wori,' said Adit in a low voice. 'It makes you look stupid.'
'I would like to learn this other writing of the Hundred,' said Mai.
'If you didn't apprentice with the Lantern, you can't,' he said, tweaking his sleeves.
Adit hid her flushed face behind a hand.
'Why not?' Mai asked.
'Because you can't,' he repeated stubbornly. She suspected he now felt trapped by her attention and Adit's embarrassment. 'No one does.'
'Not doing it is not the same as not being able to do it. For one thing, surely the Ri Amarah did not apprentice with the Lantern and yet they know how to write in the temple script-'
'Eiya! Well! Them!'
'What does that mean? Them.'
He shrugged. 'They're outlanders. They don't even worship properly.'
'I'm an outlander.'
'Do you make offerings at the seven temples?'
T don't. I have a shrine to the Merciful One. That's where I pray.'
'That's the Merciless One,' he said with a smug smile.
'No, it isn't,' said Adit suddenly. 'I've talked to the women who work here, and they told me it's the Merciful One. Full of mercy. There's a prayer they say, 'I go to the Merciful One for refuge. I go to the Truth for refuge. I go to the Awakened for refuge.''
