Sekar had learned to read a ledger by its smell. Honest accounts smelled of camphor and ordinary dust. Falsified ones smelled of too much care, of fresh ink laid over old, of someone sitting up late with a lamp.
The vault beneath the temple archive smelled of all three. It was a long stone cellar lined with cedar shelves, cool and dry and lit by oil lamps that Wibawa trimmed every quarter hour as though they might sulk. The depot records from Branajaya's compound had come in on six carts. They sat in stacks on the central table, tied with cord and stamped with the king's seal.
"Eleven years of tribute," Sekar said, turning a palm-leaf folio toward the light. "He reported every harvest as a loss. Floods, blight, locusts. The numbers move in the right direction, but they move too neatly. Real disasters are untidy."
"Lord Mentari taught me to look for the tidy ones," Wibawa said. He had inked his thumbs black over three days of copying. "Is that how you knew?"
