The Dragon's Reluctant Accountant

• Chapter 1 The Ledger of Dread
• Chapter 2 Ash and Arithmetic
• Chapter 3 Entering the Caldera
• Chapter 4 Scales, Claws, and Receipts
• Chapter 5 The Chaos of Centuries
• Chapter 6 An Asset of Doubtful Origin
• Chapter 7 Balancing the Brimstone
• Chapter 8 Tea Brewed Over Dragonfire
• Chapter 9 Missing Bullion and Misplaced Trust
• Chapter 10 The Whispering Relic
• Chapter 11 A Double-Entry Dilemma
• Chapter 12 Moonlight on Molten Gold
• Chapter 13 The Stolen Core
• Chapter 14 Deductions and Revelations
• Chapter 15 A Vulnerable Wyrm
• Chapter 16 Sifting Through Curses
• Chapter 17 The Thief’s Paper Trail
• Chapter 18 Warmth Beneath the Hoard
• Chapter 19 An Unexpected Dividend
• Chapter 20 Shadows in the Ledger
• Chapter 21 The Cost of a Heart
• Chapter 22 Audit of the Soul
• Chapter 23 Reconciling the Truth
• Chapter 24 The Dragon’s Defense
• Chapter 25 Net Worth and True Value
• Chapter 26 A Balanced Life

The letter did not smell of parchment, dried squid ink, or the faint, reassuring almond scent of good drafting gum. It smelled of scorched slate and mutton tallow, with a pervasive top note of sulfuric brine that made Humphrey Parnassus sneeze three times in brisk, rhythmic succession.

He set his handkerchief back into the breast pocket of his coat, smoothed down the gray broadcloth lapels, and re-read the missive for the fifth time that morning. The calligraphy was abominable. The strokes were broad, erratic, and bore down upon the hide so heavily that in several places the velum had split, resembling small claw marks rather than standard Guild cursive.

To the Most Practiced and Unflinching Registrar of Debts, Humphrey Parnassus, Esq., the letter began, though someone had originally written To Whom It May Vex and crossed it out with a violent smear of charcoal.

You are hereby summoned—or rather, formally contracted under the Royal Act of Mercantile Oversight, Tenth Year of the Peace—to present yourself, your inks, your rulers, and whatever abacus you deem sturdiest, to the Caldera of Mount Kar. You are to compile a true and rigorous accounting of all assets, titles, relics, and unspecified shiny materials currently resident within the premises. Payment shall be forty sovereigns per week of labor, plus three percent of any forgotten silver uncovered beneath the sedimentary strata of copper coin. Failure to arrive by the autumnal equinox shall result in a general blight upon your lineage, or at the very least, the total combustion of your professional premises on High Street.

The signature at the bottom was not a name, but an impression pressed into scarlet sealing wax: an enormous, five-taloned footprint surrounding the imprint of an anchor.

Humphrey leaned back in his tall, leather-backed swivel chair. The chair groaned slightly, a familiar and comfortingly predictable sound. His office in the lower quarter of Oakhaven was small, narrow, and arranged with the precision of a cathedral clock. The ledger volumes stood on their oak shelves in descending order of size, bound in uniform buckram with gold-stamped dates along the spines. There was an inkpot for black, an inkpot for vermilion, an inkpot for sepia, and a sandbox filled with finely sifted river silt that had been dried over a spirit burner twice to ensure not a single grain stuck to the nibs.

There was no dust in Humphrey’s office. Dust was an unaccounted-for variable, and Humphrey despised unaccounted-for variables.

"He won't eat you," Penelope said. She was leaning against his doorframe, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows, a half-munched apple in one hand and a stack of shipping manifests in the other. Penelope was Humphrey’s junior associate, though she treated the concept of seniority with the casual irreverence she showed toward damp ink. "Everyone knows Lord Valerius hasn't eaten a guildsman since the Treaty of the Iron Bell. Well, not a certified one, anyway. Freelance assessors are another matter entirely."

"It is not the eating that concerns me," Humphrey said, his voice level and entirely devoid of theatrical terror. He picked up his wooden ruler and nudged the letter until it was precisely parallel with the green blotter. "It is the sheer, unmitigated administrative atrocity that this summons represents. Mount Kar has not filed a declaration of personal assets since the third reign of Queen Gwendolyn. That was four hundred and sixty years ago, Penelope."

"Think of the interest," she said, biting the apple with an audible crunch.

"Think of the sorting," Humphrey countered, his stomach sinking at the thought. "Do you have any concept of what four centuries of indiscriminate accumulation looks like? Dragons do not use the double-entry bookkeeping system. They do not employ inventory tags. If an archduke sends them a tribute of silver plate, they do not file a bill of lading; they kick it into a corner and take a nap on top of it. It will be chaos. It will be mountains of unsorted detritus mixed with priceless cultural patrimony, all covered in an inch of hardened soot."

"Forty sovereigns a week," Penelope pointed out. "And the Guild needs the tithe. If you refuse the contract, Master Corcoran will simply send Timothy, and Timothy would faint the moment a wivern hissed at him, let alone a Great Red."

Humphrey winced. The thought of Timothy—a young man who still struggled with balancing credit columns that crossed into fractional groats—attempting an imperial audit was horrifying. Timothy would leave trailing decimals all over a mountain.

"Timothy cannot tell a sovereign from a guilder if the mint marks are worn," Humphrey muttered. "He would list a cursed scepter under 'Household Ironware.'"

"Exactly," Penelope said. "Whereas you, Humphrey, have no fear of the dark, no fear of heights, and no soul to speak of when it comes to a ledger out of balance. You are the only man between here and the coast who would tell an eighty-foot fire-drake that he owes forty crowns in customs arrears on an antique bath basin."

"The law applies to all landholders within the crown’s borders," Humphrey said stiffly. "Regardless of wingspan."

He rose from his desk. He was a man of thirty-two, thin-framed, with dark brown hair that stubbornly parted itself in the center and wire-rimmed spectacles that had a habit of sliding down his nose whenever he frowned. He frowned frequently. He crossed the small room to the travel-chest resting in the alcove. It was an iron-banded box, designed to fit snugly on the back of a pack mule, fitted internally with velvet-lined compartments for his balance scales, brass-cased compasses, three dozen graphite sticks, two jars of gall-oak ink, and seven blank parchment folios bound in tough, oilcloth-wrapped calfskin.

He had lived a quiet life. He liked mornings that began with weak chicory tea and cold toast. He liked the afternoon sun when it struck the corner of his oak desk at two o'clock, illuminating the quiet dust motes hanging over the columned accounts of grain merchants and tallow-chandlers. The world outside Oakhaven was famously full of bards, soldiers, broken treaties, and monsters, but none of those things had ever succeeded in being more interesting than a well-constructed balance sheet where every single pence matched its origin.

Yet, there was the red seal with the claw mark. And there was the small, embarrassing fact that Humphrey’s firm was five months behind on the rent for the street-front office, entirely due to his refusal to take on the corrupt, falsified books of the regional wine cartel. Honesty was notoriously unprofitable in the borderlands.

"I shall require two weeks' worth of travel rations," Humphrey said, reaching for his greatcoat on the brass peg behind the door. "Salted cod, hard biscuits, and those dried plums that taste like leather. Nothing that spoils. And ensure that the runner brings me three bottles of spirit-lamp oil. I have no intention of trying to decipher sixteenth-century gold-stamps by the light of sulfurous embers."

Penelope tossed her apple core toward the waste bin. It landed square in the center. "You're actually going, then? Just like that? No weeping, no last will and testament?"

"My will was drawn up when I was twenty-one, as is standard procedure for any junior member of the Guild," Humphrey said, pulling on his leather traveling gloves and smoothing the fingers down one by one. "It is properly witnessed, sealed, and lodged with the Clerk of the Rolls. If I am consumed by fire, the firm passes to you, provided you pass your general certification in asset appraisal by the winter term."

Penelope’s smile faltered slightly, replaced by a sudden, unusual sobriety. "Be careful, Humphrey. People talk about the dragons like they're just oversized lords who happen to have scales, but they aren't men. They don't think like men. They remember things that happened before our great-grandfathers were clay, and they don't like giving up anything they've put their claws on."

"I do not intend to take anything," Humphrey replied. He picked up his case by its brass handle, testing the balance. "I merely intend to write it down. Men fight over gold because they want to spend it. Dragons sleep on it because they want to have it. Between the two, the dragon is far more logical, even if his filing system is an insult to the gods."

The road to Mount Kar did not begin with grand arches or paved imperial stones. It began as a wide rutted track used by coal-carters, leading northwest out of the river valley toward the jagged spine of the Wyrmtooth Range.

Humphrey rode a rented gelding named Barnaby. Barnaby was twenty years old, had one cloudy eye, and moved at the precise, unhurried pace of an old clockwork pendulum. This suited Humphrey perfectly; horses that bolted or displayed enthusiasm were an unnecessary hazard to the stability of portable inkpots.

For the first two days, the landscape was merely dull. The rolling cabbage fields and muddy pastures of the lower basin gave way to stony scrubland where thin-fleeced sheep stared at him with blank, horizontal eyes. The air grew thinner, losing the damp, cabbage-and-woodsmoke smell of the human settlements and taking on the sharp, dry tang of high stone. By the third afternoon, the horizon was dominated by the immense, dark mass of Mount Kar itself.

It was not a picturesque mountain. It lacked the snow-capped, crystalline dignity of the northern peaks. Kar was a jagged, truncated stump of basalt, its summit hollowed out into a vast bowl like a broken tooth. A perpetual smear of thin, yellow-gray vapor hung over its rim, trailing southward across the blue autumn sky like greasy wool. Even from ten miles away, the mountain felt less like a feature of the geography and more like an enormous furnace that had been left to smolder unattended.

Humphrey consulted his pocket watch. Half-past three. According to his calculations, he would reach the base of the mountain trail before nightfall.

He drew rein beside a small, low-ceilinged stone way-house that crouched beside the final spring before the climb. A sign above the lintel, carved from some rot-resistant bog oak, read The Last Copper. It was the sort of place that catered entirely to desperate prospectors, foolish mercenaries, and the occasional traveling fool who thought he might find a dropped dragon scale in the scree and sell it for three months’ beer.

Inside, the tavern was dark and smelled overwhelmingly of cabbage soup and wet dog. A handful of local men in thick frieze coats sat near the hearth, murmuring in the low, guttural dialect of the high hills. When Humphrey stepped through the door, his brass-bound case in hand and his spectacles gleaming in the firelight, the murmur died instantly.

The innkeeper, a man whose nose appeared to have been broken by several different instruments over a long career, looked Humphrey up and down. He lingered particularly on Humphrey’s clean leather boots and the neat wool muff around his neck.

"Lost, master?" the innkeeper asked, wiping a tin mug with a rag of dubious cleanliness.

"I am not lost," Humphrey said. "I am punctual. I require a bowl of broth, three boiled potatoes without salt, and a stall for my gelding until tomorrow morning. After that, I shall require directions to the eastern chimney path."

The men by the fire exchanged looks. One of them, an old fellow with a beard stained orange around the mouth from pipe-weed, let out a short, wet wheeze that might have been a laugh.

"No one goes up the chimney path this time of year," the old man said. "The Old One's restless. Been shaking the ash out of his blankets all week. Every sheep-farmer between here and the gorge has moved his stock into the stone barns. You go up there in them shiny shoes, city man, and you won't even make a decent mouthful. He likes his meat seasoned, they say, but he don't care much for wool and ink."

"I am not an offering," Humphrey said calmly. He set two copper bits on the grease-stained counter. "I am an auditor."

The silence returned, deeper and distinctly more bewildered than before.

"A what?" the innkeeper asked.

"An auditor. The Royal Council, under the provisions of the post-war pacification accords, requires an official assessment of the real and personal property held within sovereign territories. Mount Kar constitutes an unassessed demesne. I have a contract."

He produced the folded paper from his pocket, showing the wax seal.

The innkeeper did not touch it, but his eyes widened until the yellowish whites showed around his pupils. He stepped back half an inch from the counter, his rag dropping onto the beer-troughs.

"That's his mark," the innkeeper whispered. "That's the Drake's own stamp. He hasn't put that to parchment since the year they burned the monastery at Oakhaven."

"Indeed," Humphrey said. "And the record of that monastery's library was also lost, which represents an enormous gap in the regional cultural ledger. A great tragedy. Now, regarding the potatoes?"

The innkeeper served him in total, reverent silence. Even the men by the fire spoke only in whispers, occasionally glancing at Humphrey as if he were a corpse that had temporarily forgotten how to lie down. Humphrey ate his meal with methodical efficiency—cutting each potato into four equal quarters before consumption—and retired to a small room under the eaves where the floor was relatively level.

He spent the evening not in prayer or trembling reflection, but in cutting new quills. A proper goose feather, if trimmed with a flat, forty-five-degree slant, could produce clear, non-bleeding figures for up to three pages before requiring the knife again. He prepared twenty-four of them, laying them side by side in his leather roll like surgical instruments.

When he looked out the narrow window, the silhouette of Mount Kar stood black against the stars. High up near the rim, where the cold air met the volcanic chimney, a faint, rhythmic pulse of dull orange light breathed against the low clouds. It was like the slow, steady beat of an immense, burning heart buried under miles of stone.

Humphrey adjusted his spectacles, blew out his tallow candle, and went to sleep.

The morning broke gray and damp, with a freezing mist that clung to the furze bushes like spun glass. Humphrey left Barnaby in the care of the still-stunned innkeeper, strapped his leather pack onto his shoulders, took his brass-shod walking staff in his left hand and his ledger case in his right, and began the ascent.

The path was worse than the maps indicated. It was not a road; it was an ancient spill of basalt slag that had been cracked by ice and smoothed by centuries of seasonal washouts. In several places, Humphrey was forced to wedge his boots into narrow fissures and scramble upward on hands and knees, taking meticulous care not to scrape the corners of his calfskin case against the jagged rock.

The sulfur grew stronger with every hundred yards of elevation. It was not the light, pleasant smell of a hot bath, but the thick, yellow, throat-catching reek of deep earth that had been turned inside out. It settled in the back of his mouth like brass pennies. His wool coat began to feel heavy with the moisture of the low clouds, and small flakes of gray ash—light as down, but gritty when rubbed between the fingers—settled upon his shoulders.

By noon, the scrub trees had completely vanished. The world had become entirely black and gray: black basalt, gray ash, and the white, featureless ceiling of the mountain fog. There were no birds here. There were only the strange, groaning drafts that rose from the cracks in the stone, whistling through the vents like the pipes of an untuned organ.

Humphrey stopped on a narrow shelf of stone to catch his breath and check his instruments. His aneroid barometer showed a steady, steep drop in air pressure. He reached into his coat, took out a small bottle of cold tea, took two swallows, and wiped the moisture from his spectacles with his silk handkerchief.

"Grossly inefficient access," he muttered to the wind. "A simple mule-cart switchback would increase trade efficiency by four hundred percent. If an individual wishes to hold assets, an individual should provide reasonable transit for assessors."

He turned the corner of the basalt chimney, and the path abruptly ended.

Before him lay the Great Gate of the Caldera.

It was not a gate in the human sense. There were no iron hinges, no portcullises, no stone guardhouses with bored sentries playing dice. It was an enormous, natural fissure in the lip of the crater, fifty paces wide and easily ninety paces high, that had been roughly squared off by some violence so immense that the rock face still bore the glassy, melted sheen of catastrophic heat.

Above the entrance, carved into the stone with strokes so deep that pines had taken root within the letters, was an inscription in Ancient Lowland Wyrm-tongue. Humphrey, who had spent three years during his clerkship deciphering ancient border deeds for the High Court of Chancery, squinted up at the characters.

Everything within is mine, the inscription read. Everything without is merely delayed.

Humphrey nodded once. "A very typical assertion of absolute title. Legally unsupportable under the Treaty of the Iron Bell, of course, but typical."

He did not pause to shout a challenge. He did not blow a horn, nor did he draw a sword, having never owned one in his life. He simply adjusted the strap of his ledger case, lifted his hem slightly to avoid a pool of warm, yellowish grease that was trickling across the threshold, and walked into the mountain.

The transition from the mountain air to the interior was like stepping into an oven that had been turned off an hour before. The chill of the autumn morning vanished instantly, replaced by a thick, heavy, radiant heat that pressed against Humphrey's chest like an iron blanket. The light did not come from torches or windows, but from the floor itself: veins of dark, dull-red heat traced their way through the floor of the cavern, glowing through the cracks like the embers in a blacksmith’s pit.

The cavern was vast. So vast that the ceiling was lost in a hanging curtain of brown and purple smoke that drifted lazily in the convective drafts. Pillars of stone, thick as old oaks and twisted like barley-sugar, supported the immense weight of the summit above.

And then there was the floor.

Humphrey stopped. His spectacles slid halfway down his nose, but for the first time in his professional career, he did not immediately push them back up.

The floor was not stone. It was a sea of metal.

It did not sit in neat, stacked rows of standard ingots, as Humphrey had spent the last ten years seeing in the vaults of the Merchant Exchange. It was not sorted by weight, by purity, or by nation of origin. It was a vast, sprawling, undulating topography of pure, unadulterated chaos.

To his left rose a hillock of silver plate—candlesticks, platters, church censers, salt-cellars, and belt-buckles—tumbled together as if they had been dumped from an enormous sack and left to slide where they would. Some of the platters were bent double; others had melted slightly and fused together into grotesque, multi-armed masses of metal.

To his right, a depression in the basalt was filled to the brim with gold coins of every conceivable size and vintage: thin, clipped coins from the old river-republics, heavy, thick-stamped crowns from the western kingdoms, square trade-tokens from the Southern Isles, and ancient, spade-shaped brass pieces that hadn't seen the light of a market since the First Age of Men. They were mixed indiscriminately with broken horse-bits, shattered shields, several hundred brass door-knockers, and what appeared to be an entire iron carriage with its wheels missing, sitting drunkenly in a drift of unpolished garnets.

The sheer, staggering disorder of it took Humphrey's breath away. His fingers twitched toward his measuring tape. His skin prickled with a sudden, professional fury that completely eclipsed any lingering sense of personal danger.

"Abominable," he whispered into the cavern. "Utterly, unspeakably abominable. There isn't an inventory ledger in the world that could survive this without three appendices."

"You are late," a voice said.

The voice did not come from the air. It came from the gold.

Fifty paces ahead of Humphrey, what he had taken to be a particularly high mound of dark, bronze-colored gravel began to shift. The movement was slow, fluid, and accompanied by a sound like twenty thousand copper pennies sliding down a tin chute.

A drift of gold shields cascaded down the slope, clattering noisily onto the stone below. Through the cloud of yellow dust and ash that rose from the disturbance, two eyes opened.

They were not red, as the penny-dreadfuls always claimed. They were a cold, brilliant, sulfurous amber, with pupils that were vertical slits no thicker than a single thread of binding-silk. The head that emerged from the pile was long, wedge-shaped, and plated with scales the color of dried blood and old iron, each one the size of a spade-blade and edged with a dull, coppery luster.

The great beast did not roar. It did not exhale a plume of incinerating flame. It simply raised its head until its snout was level with the top of the stone pillars, looked down at Humphrey with an expression of profound, centuries-old boredom, and sneezed.

A cloud of sparks and pulverized charcoal blew past Humphrey’s boots, singing the hem of his gray trousers.

Humphrey did not flinch. He carefully reached into his coat pocket, extracted his handkerchief, wiped a fleck of gray soot from his left spectacle lens, and looked up into the amber eyes.

"I am not late," Humphrey said, his voice ringing crisp and clear through the vast, echoing cavern. "I arrived precisely at four minutes before noon on the nineteenth of September. The contract stipulated the autumnal equinox, which does not officially occur until six o'clock tomorrow evening. If anything, my Lord Valerius, I am twenty-eight hours early."

The dragon’s eyes narrowed until the vertical slits were almost invisible. A long, dark tongue, wet with something that hissed when it touched the dry stone, flicked out and tasted the air.

"An accountant," the dragon rumbled, the sound vibrating through Humphrey’s shinbones and rattling the pens inside his leather case. "They sent a little one. With glass over his eyes."

"The size of the auditor has no bearing upon the accuracy of the summation," Humphrey replied. He set his case down upon a relatively flat ingoted block of lead, clicked the brass catches open, and produced his first blank ledger folio. "Now, if your lordship would be so good as to direct me to your current accounts receivable, we might begin with the liquid assets."

The silence that greeted Humphrey’s request stretched out long enough for several flakes of loose soot to drift down from the ceiling and land upon his freshly uncapped inkstand.

Lord Valerius did not immediately reply. Instead, the great reptilian head tilted sideways, a motion that caused several metric tons of ancient weaponry and crushed chalices to shift beneath his coiled bulk with a discordant clatter. One massive, horn-crested brow arched upward, revealing a ring of pale, luminous gold around the contracted pupil. The dragon exhaled, a long, low gust that carried the dry, baking scent of crushed basalt and ancient furnaces.

"Receivable," the dragon murmured. The word grated through the cavern like millstones turning without grain. "You speak as though the world owes me a debt that must be ferried here in carts. The world owes me nothing that I cannot simply take, mortal. And what is taken does not remain receivable. It is received."

"A common misconception among absolute sovereigns," Humphrey said briskly. He removed a clean wooden penholder from its felt-lined slot, fitted a fine steel nib into the ferrule, and uncorked a bottle of standard iron-gall black. "Receipt without contemporaneous documentation is merely possession. Possession, under the Imperial Codices of Commerce, does not constitute recognized legal equity until validated by a public registrar. In short, your lordship, without an audit, you do not technically possess a hoard; you merely preside over an uncatalogued landfill of precious metals."

The slit pupils dilated slightly, then snapped back into hair-thin lines. "A landfill."

"Of historical scale, certainly," Humphrey conceded, dipping his nib with a single, practiced motion. "A monumental aggregate of capital, but an administrative catastrophe nonetheless. For example, that mound of ceremonial poleaxes behind your left wing appears to be suffering from severe structural subsidence. If an inventory check is not performed to establish baseline weights, you risk catastrophic devaluation through friction, oxidation, and sheer atmospheric crusting."

The dragon rose slightly higher upon his forelegs. The movement was deceptively silent for a creature whose forearm was thicker than the trunk of an ancient cedar, though the sea of gold coins hissed like breakers on a shingle beach as his talons settled into them. A low, rhythmic thrumming sound began somewhere deep within the beast’s ribcage—not an engine of war preparing to cast flame, but rather the curious, resonant vibration of an immense mind attempting to comprehend an entirely alien form of insect.

"I called for an assessor because the High Crown sent a herald two moons ago," Valerius rumbled, the sound vibrating the ink in Humphrey's open well. "The boy stood upon my outer rim, quivering like an aspen leaf, and read from a very long roll of paper. He claimed that under the Treaty of the Iron Bell, every sovereign entity between the northern sea and the salt marshes must submit an itemized tally of territorial wealth, lest the Crown levy an arbitrary tribute of fifty thousand marks."

"That would be Lord Chancellor Vane’s initiative," Humphrey said, his pen already making small, precise scratching noises across the top margin of the folio as he inscribed the date, location, and preliminary atmospheric conditions. "The Crown is facing a severe liquidity crisis following the eastern campaigns. By threatening arbitrary levies on unassessed estates, the treasury hopes to force ancient landholders into voluntary compliance. If you fail to file, they will send bailiffs."

The dragon’s upper lip twitched, exposing two feet of ivory tooth that looked sharp enough to sever an anvil. "Let them send bailiffs. The crows around the base of the mountain have been thin of late."

"Bailiffs are bureaucratic pests, my lord. They do not arrive alone. They come with writs, with embargoes on lowland supply routes, and with legions of royal clerks who will freeze your external assets," Humphrey stated without looking up from his lines. He drew a perfectly straight border along the left-hand side of the sheet without using his brass ruler, relying purely on the steady muscle memory of fifteen years behind a drafting desk. "Furthermore, if you incinerate a bailiff, you incur an excise penalty for the destruction of crown property, which carries an automatic compounding interest rate of eight percent per annum. It is infinitely more economical to simply let me count your spoons."

"I do not possess spoons," Valerius growled, though the heat had left his voice, replaced by a sullen, bewildered irritation.

"I can see three silver ladles and an enameled sugar-sifter protruding from the drift beside your tail," Humphrey pointed out, pointing the wet tip of his pen toward the glittering debris. "Which brings us directly to the methodology. We shall proceed by quadrant, beginning with this entry shelf and working radially inward toward the primary nesting depression. I shall require a stable work surface, an absence of drafts exceeding three miles per hour, and a strict understanding that nothing—under any circumstances—is to be incinerated while it is in the process of being tabulated."

The Great Red lowered his head until his snout was resting directly on the lip of the lead ingot that served as Humphrey’s desk. The heat radiating from the beast’s dark scales was staggering, like standing before the open door of a glassworks kiln. Humphrey could smell the mineral dust baked into the dragon’s skin, an aroma that reminded him oddly of dry bricks after a summer thunderstorm, layered over with the sharper, colder tang of deep metals. A pair of nostrils, wide enough to swallow a sheep whole, expanded and contracted with a slow, hot draft that fluttered the edges of Humphrey’s blank page.

"You have no fear," the dragon noted, not with admiration, but with deep suspicion. "The last clerk who stood in this hall wept until his garments were soaked, then threw himself down the chimney fissure rather than look upon my teeth."

"The previous clerk was likely an uncertified apprentice from the diocesan registry," Humphrey said smoothly, blowing gently upon his wet header to set the ink. "Men who deal solely in church tithes are notoriously fragile in their constitutions. They are accustomed to dealing with parish priests and modest gifts of barley. I, however, am a Senior Fellow of the Guild of Scriveners and Assessors. I have spent three weeks auditing the accounts of the Grand Duke’s private mercenaries while they sharpened their pikes in the courtyard. Compared to thirty illiterate pikemen who believe their ale allowance has been shorted by two pence, your lordship is a model of civic decorum."

The dragon made a sound that might have been a snort, though it released enough pulverized pumice to cover Humphrey’s sleeve in a fine gray frost. Humphrey sighed, produced his silk handkerchief once more, and brushed the sleeve clean with two crisp strokes.

"Ash," Humphrey murmured, shaking his head. "The depreciation on garments alone will need to be entered as a miscellaneous business expense. Now, Lord Valerius. The primary matter at hand is the categorization of the lower terrace. We must distinguish between bullion, coin of legal tender, historical curiosities, and unrefined mineral scrap. Which of these mounds constitutes your most recent acquisition?"

Valerius turned his amber eyes toward the far corner of the chamber, where a vast, tumbled mass of pale timber and torn velvet lay beneath a scattering of iron chests. "Three centuries ago, a margrave from the border march attempted to build a toll-gate across the gorge below. He brought three hundred men-at-arms and twelve heavy baggage wagons containing the taxation of his province. I found the toll-gate offensive to the eye."

"Naturally," Humphrey said. "An aesthetic nuisance. And the wagons?"

"They are over there," the dragon replied, flicking a lazy tail toward the debris. "Or what remains of them. The wood has dried rather badly, but the iron bands were of good quality."

"We shall classify that as Sovereign Confiscation, Series B," Humphrey said, his pen flying across the paper with rhythmic, clicking precision. "Were the tax revenues comprised of silver groats or gold nobles?"

"They were shiny," Valerius said, his voice dripping with ancient contempt. "And they made a pleasing noise when dropped from a height. I did not inspect the faces stamped upon them."

Humphrey paused, his pen poised a fraction of an inch above the pristine paper. He looked up, his spectacles slipping slightly as he fixed the great wyrm with an expression of stern, professional reproof.

"You did not inspect the mint marks?"

"I am a dragon," Valerius hissed, a ring of yellow flame licking around the margins of his black lips. "I am the fire of the deep earth made flesh. I am the shadow that swallows the sun. I do not peer at little metal circles like an old woman counting eggs in a basket!"

"Well, you should have," Humphrey said, entirely unimpressed by the sulfurous display. "A fourth-century King Alden noble carries a collector's premium of nearly thirty percent above its melt value due to the purity of the strike. If you simply let them sit beneath the wreckage of the margrave's baggage carts, rubbing against common pig-iron, the numismatic grade drops from 'Extremely Fine' to 'Good to Fair.' You are losing capital by the hour simply through poor storage practices."

The dragon stared at him. The yellow flame guttered and went out with a soft whuff.

For several moments, the only sound in the enormous volcanic hall was the distant, hollow dripping of water somewhere deep in the dark recesses of the mountain, and the steady, dry scrape of Humphrey's pen as he recorded the opening entry: One (1) uncatalogued provincial treasury, provenance Margraviate of the March, mixed condition, subject to immediate salvage assessment.

"This," Valerius muttered, slowly lowering his immense bulk until his belly rested against the warm drifts of coin, "is going to be intolerable."

"Rigorous bookkeeping is never comfortable, my lord," Humphrey replied cheerfully, dipping his pen once more. "If it were pleasant, they would employ minstrels rather than accountants. Now, step back slightly, if you please. You are blocking the light from the eastern fissure, and I cannot properly ascertain whether that tarnished object beneath your left claw is a silver monstrance or an uncommonly large spittoon."