Part 5 of the Letters and Ledgers series

It took Nobbybanks forty minutes. He wrote it by hand, in the small precise script that had been filling ledgers since before most of the household had been born. UG read none of it. Flinch read all of it, twice, standing at Nobbybanks’s shoulder with the expression of someone watching a document that describes them being drawn up in real time.

When he was done, Nobbybanks read it back and set the pen down.

“Head of Accounts and Muncle of Record,” he said. “That’s me. Operations—” He looked at Flinch. “Are you the Muncle of Operations?”

UG, from the corner, without looking up: “Of course. He was the first.”

Flinch said nothing. He refilled the teapot. He found something to tidy in his corner — the small, deliberate corner that was his, with the bed and the lantern and the spade, the things UG had provided one at a time before anyone had thought to call any of it a room. He tidied it for slightly longer than it needed tidying.

Nobbybanks watched this without comment. He signed the articles, dated them, and held them out.

“You’ll want a copy,” he said. “Someone in this household needs to keep one.”

Flinch took the document in both hands and looked at it — the careful handwriting, the proper headings, the line that said Muncle of Operations in the same ink as everything else, given the same weight as everything else.

“Right,” he said. “Right. I’ll file it proper.”

Nobbybanks nodded once, and picked up his tea, and that was the founding ceremony of HomunculAI Systems Ltd: a biscuit, a teapot, forty minutes of handwriting, and a dredger finding something to tidy until he was sure nobody was going to look at his face directly.

Outside, Founder’s Point settled into its early evening sounds — gulls somewhere above, the distant knock of construction that had been ongoing since before anyone could remember, and the faint background noise of whatever Lichmyface was doing on the floor above, which Nobbybanks had decided early in the visit not to investigate.

He would go back to Ironforge in the morning. He would write to the Arcanum, carefully, in the way you write to someone who knows what they’re doing and needs to understand that you do too. He would file the number in his ledger under a new heading — not the one it had lived under before.

He was not ready to call it a good investment yet. He had been caught out calling things good too early. He would say only, for now, that it was an investment with a clearer picture than it had had yesterday, and that the people running it — one of them, anyway, wearing dark blue-green and carrying the articles in both hands — knew what they didn’t know and worked hard on the things they did.

That was, in his experience, considerably more than most.

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More in the Letters and Ledgers series

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