I Audited the Demon King's Castle, and He Won't Let Me Leave novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Six Hundred and Forty
The vault holds 640 crowns, 212 servants are five months unpaid, and the king eats last. The seal on the slip carries a human fingerprint.
"You can let go of my wrist," Nanami said.
The king looked down at his grip.
He let go at once.
"Forgive me," he said, stiffly. "I haven't had a guest in a while."
"I'm not a guest. I'm an auditor with a signed engagement letter."
"Then I'll behave like a man who has signed one."
He did not step back, though.
He stood close enough that she could smell cedar and ink on his coat, and she found that she did not mind it.
Gorund cleared his throat.
"The vault, Your Majesty?"
"The vault," said the king. "Show her the worst of it first."
The vault was a stone room under the counting room with an iron door and a single iron box inside.
Gorund set the box on a barrel and lifted the lid.
Nanami counted by lamplight while both men watched her fingers.
"Six hundred and forty crowns," she said. "That matches page forty-one."
"It matches because we don't spend anything," said Gorund.
"Where does the food come from?"
"The farms owe us rent in grain. Nobody pays the castle in gold anymore."
"And your staff?"
"Two hundred and twelve," said the king. "They haven't been paid in five months."
Nanami put down the coin she was holding.
"Then why are they still here?"
Neither man answered.
Breakfast was served in the great hall at a table built for forty people.
Barely a dozen people sat at it.
Nanami was given a bowl of barley stew, hot and thick, with a heel of dark bread beside it.
The king's bowl came last.
It was thinner than hers, and the bread had been cut from the end.
She noticed that nobody offered it to him.
He took it without comment and ate it standing at the window.
"Sit down," Nanami said.
"I'm used to it."
"I'm not. I can't audit a man who's about to fall over."
The corner of his mouth moved, the first time she had seen it do that.
He sat.
A thin clerk in a plum coat came into the hall and bowed to the king, not very low.
"A notice from the Collector," he said, and left a scroll beside the stew.
Nanami broke the seal and read it.
"Twenty thousand crowns in Council levy," she said. "Due at the full moon."
"Against a vault of six hundred and forty."
"This is a rounded number."
"It's the number he wants," said the king.
"Then I'll check how he got it," Nanami said, and put the scroll aside for later.
After breakfast she went back to the counting room and asked for the slip of record from page forty.
Gorund brought it in a flat tin box.
It was a half sheet of thick cream paper, signed by no one.
At the bottom was a round of dark red wax, stamped with a ring.
The ring showed a crown with a broken horn.
"My father's seal," said the king.
He had come in behind her without a sound.
He bent over her shoulder to look, and his breath moved a loose hair by her ear.
Nanami did not lean away.
She took off her glasses, wiped them on her blouse and put them back on.
Then she held the wax up to the lamp.
"There's a mark in the wax," she said. "Look."
He looked.
In the red, at the very edge of the stamp, someone's thumb had pressed down while the wax was soft.
The whorls were clear, small and tight, all the way round.
"A fingerprint," Nanami said.
"A what?"
"A thumbprint. Every person has their own. Give me your hand."
He held it out, palm up.
She pressed his thumb into a soft pat of candle wax.
It came away smooth and blank, with only a faint ridge where the claw met the skin.
"Demons don't leave prints," he said slowly.
"Someone put a human thumb in your father's wax."
The king straightened up.
For a long moment he said nothing at all.
"Then somebody with human hands used my father's ring," he said, "and nobody in this castle has human hands but you."
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