The Quartermaster's Ledger

The ledger, once she could read it, told a story she already knew the end of. Grain came up the pass from the southern depots in sealed carts; the seals were whole; the weights were right; and the Gate was still, somehow, four hundred sacks light against the manifest. In her first life the shortfall had been discovered in the spring, blamed on a clerk, and forgotten. The clerk had hanged himself. The grain had kept leaking for six more years.

It took her three evenings with Ho Dan's ledgers to find the seam: the manifests were honest and the carts were honest, and the depot the carts left from did not exist. It was a name on paper, drawing rations for two thousand men who had never been born, signed for each month by an inspector of supply whose signature she recognized. Younger, looser, less practiced than it would be at the bottom of her death warrant — but she would have known Mun Jae-hyon's hand in the dark.

She sat back. The lamp guttered. Somewhere south of the mountains, a junior inspector of supply was building the fortune that would one day buy a chancellorship, a southern vineyard, and a cup of silverroot wine.

"Lieutenant?" said Ho Dan, watching her face. "Is it bad?"

"It's early," she said, which was the truest thing she had said in either life. "That's better than bad."