The silence in the Great Council Hall was not broken by a shout. It was broken by the dry, rhythmic scratching of Tomas Reed’s slate pencil as he stood before the Speaker’s dais, writing the final accounting figures onto a clean forty-four-character board.
“The historical deficit of the Grand Adventurers’ Guild,” Tomas announced, holding the board high so that both the Lords and the Burgesses could read the iron-gall stone carving, “is five hundred and twelve thousand, four hundred and eighty silver crowns.”
He let the figure hang in the cold air of the chamber. Even the most hardened corporate barristers flinched at the number. Five hundred thousand crowns was more than the entire annual tax revenue of the realm. It was the value of ten merchant fleets, fifty stone bridges, and the bread of forty provinces for two years.
“That’s the liquid locked deposit deposited by common subjects of the Crown that was never returned, never accounted for, and never worked,” Tomas continued, his voice steady as an iron straight-line. “Across thirty-nine years, four thousand two hundred named recipients have died in poverty waiting for deliveries that never arrived. Widows who died in parish workhouses while their husband’s burial money sat in the guild’s general indemnity pool. Farmers whose orchards were washed away because the drainage under-road drains were never cleared. Apprentices whose indentures were sold to risky syndicates when their masters died without heirs.”
