‘Everything must be held carefully to account,’ stated Johan Imus. ‘I am an indentured book-keeper and a citizen of Imperial Hesperus, the latter an honour I hold even more dear than my work at Slocha and Daviov et Cie. My father was keeper of books for Slocha and Daviov, and his before him. My work, like theirs, involves the enumeration of company accounts, the allocation of funds, the scrutiny of audits, and the day-to-day upkeep of financial income and outgoings. I have held my post for sixty-two years, and run a department of eighteen under-keepers. No, I have no wife. No kin to speak of. My work is my life.

‘Slocha and Daviov? An illustrious auction house, surely you’ve heard of it? Well, it maintains offices in the Garcel Commercia, just off the Place Fourteenth Jaumier. In the main, we deal with antique furnishing, silks, Sameterware, Brashin mannequins, and fine arts. The sale rooms are on Varsensson’s Street, beside the lifter depot. There are open fare sales every Mainsday, and specialist auctions every other Solday. Occasionally, we hold irregular fetes for particular customers or particular treasures. Last Gorgonsday, we offered a list that included eight small ouslite busts by Sambriano Kelchi and a series of humaniques from the jokaero ruins on Tornish.

‘No, sir, I am no connoisseur. My salary does not provide me with the funds to collect or speculate. But funds are my business. I am painstaking and exact in my work. I would never wish to cause Master Slocha or Master Daviov professional embarrassment by misplacing a decimal point or wrongly adding a column of figures.

‘This is why I have come. I do not make mistakes.

‘Ah, well, now you ask, we come to the meat of it, I suppose. Last Solday I set out to review the quarterly accounts. The year end looms, and the Imperial tithe statements must be returned correctly. I found an error. Well, not an error so much as an aberration. Something that could not be accounted for. It was an idle annoyance at first, but the more I studied the pages of the ledger, the more peculiar it became.

‘There was a void, you see. A void – a gap or empty place in the flow of the accounts that defied explanation. It was as if a page or two were missing from my ledger.

‘No, not at all. This was the master ledger. Only I had access to it.

‘Sir, you belittle my craft with such a question. I keep books, and I have kept books my whole life. I am a creature of accuracy. It was not simply a matter of a creeping error, a stray sub-total. There were figures missing. Simply missing. And yet, a page or two on, the books balanced, seamlessly, as if there had been no hole.