“I need you to question him,” Emily said, “while I check for magic.”
Aiden scowled. “Can’t you just cast a truth spell?”
“It depends,” Emily said. “If he’s a willing traitor, then yes. If he’s been enchanted... the truth spell might be useless. Or worse. Let me try to figure out what’s happening before we do something that might be impossible to fix.”
“Understood,” Aiden said. She grinned. “You do realize half my reporting involved listening to gossip?”
“I’m surprised they never caught on,” Emily said. “Did they never suspect you?”
“Everyone knows Aiden the Broadsheet Writer is a man with a manhood so long it stretches from one side of the city to the other,” Aiden said. “There were girls who claimed to have slept with him... hell, there were noblemen who claimed to be him. One of them even got beaten halfway to death by someone who believed him, after I exposed his... tastes... in print. No one ever looked at me and saw him. Why should they?”
Emily had to smile. “Why indeed?”
Aiden walked up to the gate. “Councilor Aiden, here to see Scribe Bajingan.”
The guard put a hand on his sword. “The scribe is very busy,” he said. “He’s seeing no one.”
“I have to see him,” Aiden insisted. She put enough iron into her voice to scare anyone who wasn’t entirely sure his boss would support him. “Immediately.”
“The scribe is very busy,” the guard repeated, coldly. It had the air of something he’d learnt by rote. “He’s seeing no one.”
Emily held up her hand and cast a minor compulsion spell. “He’ll see us,” she said. “You’ll take us to him.”
“I’ll take you to him,” the guard agreed.
He turned and marched towards the treasury. Emily followed, painfully aware of Aiden’s eyes burning into her back. The spell - the Jedi Mind Trick, she thought with a flicker of humor - was nowhere near as powerful as the spell used on Fran, but it was still dangerous. The guard could have resisted, if he’d realized he’d been enchanted, and that could have damaged his mind. She promised herself she’d do something to make it up to him, after he’d taken them to Bajingan. Her fingers touched the coins in her pocket. Perhaps she could give him enough coins to bribe his way out, if the city fell.
The interior of the building was a hive of utter chaos. Clerks ran everywhere, carrying files and documents, tearing them apart and dropping the remains in piles on the floor. A handful of men were carrying bottles of foul-smelling potions into the building, positioning them near the piles of paperwork. She heard a man shouting about needing to misfile everything, saw a man sitting by the wall crying like a baby. He clutched a file to his chest, refusing to let it go. The rest of the clerks ignored him.
“This was once the heart of the kingdom,” Aiden commented, quietly. “There was meant to be a file for everyone, with a list of everything they owned and the taxes they owed and... everything. And now it’s being destroyed.”
Emily made a face. She doubted the king had kept a file for everyone, but it would be enough to list the farms, properties and everything else that produced food and money. There’d probably been records of serfs and slaves as well as freemen and aristocrats... she had to smile as another clerk ran past, carrying files to throw on the fire. Whatever happened, whoever won, rebuilding the kingdom’s tax base would be extremely difficult. The people would have plenty of time to plan how best to hide things from the king’s assessors.
The guard stopped in front of a solid wooden door and knocked, hard. There was no answer. He rattled the knob, then turned it. The door was locked. Emily reached into her pocket and found a handful of coins, tipped the guard and sent him back to his post. She hoped he’d never quite realize what had happened to him, when the remainder of the spell faded into nothingness. The coins would buy him a whole new life if the worst happened.
“You...” Aiden sounded half-angry, half-scared. “What did you do to him?”
“What I had to do,” Emily said, curtly. She already felt guilty. “Give me a moment...”
She poked the lock with magic, then cast a spell to unlock it. There was a click. She pushed the door open, tightening her wards. The chamber looked as through a bomb had detonated inside the walls, smashing dozens of wooden filing cabinets and leaving piles of paper scattered on the desks, chairs and the floor itself. Bajingan stood in front of a cabinet, going through an endless series of files. He spun around to face them, eyes going wide. One hand twitched towards his belt before he stopped himself.
“Aiden,” he said. “And Lady Emily. What can I do for you?”
Emily didn’t need to look at Aiden to sense her sudden doubt. Bajingan looked strikingly genial for a potential traitor. It was hard to believe he could be guilty of anything, beyond - perhaps - putting his finger on the weighing scale. He closed the battered cabinet and, carrying a pair of files under his arm, made his way back to the desk. The chair was piled high with files. Bajingan shoved them onto the floor and sat down.
“We have some questions for you,” Aiden said. “What are you doing here?”
Bajingan smiled. It made him look years younger. “When I was a boy, I used to fantasize about burning the royal records,” he said. “And now I finally get my chance.”
Emily had to smile in return, despite everything. The scribes and accountants had been drilled, practically from birth, in handling the traditional letters and numbers. She’d heard the stories. Bajingan would have been woken at dawn, forced to memorize a bunch of letters and all their variants, with his
