Death and Taxes

[Peabody Polk]

((No mod please))

William James Pullhearst was in a bind.

He had just returned from Salvar, by boat the night before. He had left Aihnrekvolok in style -- his column weeks before had been a real splash among the aristocracy, who viewed it as a call to arms against the church and as wise counsel to their king. He'd been put up on a vessel of royal proportions, with royal furnishings and royal amenities -- and for a royal price tag all paid by someone other than himself, probably some royal.

But now, he was in a royal bind. And he was royally fuming.

"I knew something was up! I knew I should have come back sooner, especially when the next edition never arrived in Knife's Edge! How dare they! How dare they!"

He was staring at a printing press that did not appear to have been used in weeks. When leaving Knife's Edge he had told his assistant to print everything he sent back just as-is, and start distribution through various channels. He'd left everything there, in polite instructions on the desk, even, and his assistant knew the protocol well. Jeremiah had been working for him for nearly six months, and had been such a good helper...until this.

"I should never have left...how can I get out of this...curse you Peabody for a fool and Jeremiah for a charlatan!" His outbursts turned to wicked grumblings and spattered curses.

When he had left, the room had looked a specific way. Now, upon his return, it looked the same, only coated with a layer of dust. On the floor were the copies of the paper-to-be-printed that he had dutifully sent from Salvar every week, strewn about the floor where they had fallen through the mail-slot. More envelopes and papers littered the floor. Peabody picked those up and held them with no small sense of trepidation.

"Rotten stinker, he pocketed the money and ran...should teach me to check the references on the louts in this godforsaken world. Even London had more trustworthy citizens than this blighthole!" Opening the letters, he read with dismay as each one got more and more insistent and the tone more and more sinister. They were all from his chief creditor, a man by the name of Sellings.

"Please pay me by next week...I regret to end your credit...foreclosure imminent...now in arrears of eight hundred gold pieces..." "Eight hundred gold pieces!?" "...I may choose to reclaim your property as payment...mortgage cancellation...will resort to measures of force, if necessary..." Peabody put down the letters...Sellings had made his point. He was in serious debt, all because he'd trusted some hoodwink to print his papers on time and keep his finances in balance.

He quickly rummaged through the desk drawers. His calculations had shown that he could make at least 900 GP per issue, and the Reader was popular enough that there was no reason to assume he couldn't get out of his debt with one good issue. But there was nothing there, just enough paper and ink to produce maybe twenty copies -- only enough to make a pitiful 100 GP, nowhere near what was required to pay off creditors. He still couldn't believe his assistant had done this. The lad was young, but he had shown promise in the business and a good head for where the papers needed to be placed for maximum distribution. Why would he run off like this?

But in the bottom of the drawer, he did find something of use. Taking his prize, he settled into a chair, and began downing his last bottle of whiskey.

At this point, the only cure for bankruptcy was booze.

[Eades]

Evangeline had been keeping an eye on the offices of the esteemed Mr. Pullhearst. It hadn't taken long for the woman to figure out that Althanas was very much like the home she'd left behind in the fact that you never got something for nothing. Food and a warm bed cost an arm and a leg sometimes, especially if the bed you wanted wasn't just a pile of warm hay in a barn. When she started running errands for a Coronian "businessman", the incoming gold had been a breath of fresh air. When she was told to "influence" a certain printer to pay up on a debt, she'd suddenly wondered what she'd gotten into. As a child she'd watched ancient non-holographic films, one of them about a don Corleone. Life was starting to imitate art.

It had taken a couple of weeks, but finally she spotted Pullhearst from her perch in a nearby tree. She figured it would be best for her to wait for him to get the correspondences from her employers and then she'd confront him when he came out of the building. The less she had to explain, the better. But the day pressed on, and settled into dim evening before she began to get a little angry. Slipping from her seat, she stretched, pulling the crowbar from her belt. All it took was a nudge of her foot and she was in the open doorway, looking at the scene with disgust.

A tidy person herself, the papers strewn over the floor, the dust that had settled on everything, and the presence of a man, snoring softly, in his chair annoyed her. She stepped inside, bouncing the crowbar across her palm as she came to stand in front of Peabody's desk. She could still smell the whiskey from where it wafted gently from the open bottle, or maybe from where it laced his breath. A frown dragged across her face, and she reached over with the crowbar, rapping firmly on the top of the desk with the end.

The jerked, his eyes blinking for a moment in the unseeing gaze of the half-awake. Now Eva resumed the light bouncing of the crowbar, letting the cold iron slap down a little louder on her palm on each return. She kept her voice level and polite, even though there wasn't much of a question what would happen if things turned decidedly impolite.

"Mr. Pullhearst, I presume? I believe you have some money that belongs to a friend of mine."

[Peabody Polk]

Peabody awoke with a start, his head throbbing. He could barely make out the figure of a woman in front of him, but not for lack of light. He'd had the whole building outfitted with magical lamps a long time ago that came to life only when people were present in the flat. No, he could barely make out the lady in front of him because his head was swimming, his vision was creating three or four of everything, and his eyes couldn't seem to decide which of these ephemeral objects was real.

He tried to focus as she spoke, focus on her words, and he could tell from her tone he was in trouble. Closing his eyes tight so that the dancing images would go away, he put his head down and said, "What....wha...money, no, don't got the money, don't got it. It's there!" He gestured wildly at the floor, his eyes popping open to stare at the proofing pages scattered all over the ground, then snapping back shut again as lights exploded into his mind like cannonshell on the Cathedral of the Ethereal Sway.

But as his eyes snapped open, he also saw one dazzling object that pranced in circles in his head. A crowbar. His visitor held a crowbar. He finally realized with a start that this was real, this was no joke, and that he had to find some way out of this or he could end up on the receiving end of that blunt piece of iron. Putting his head into his hands, he tried to sob out an excuse through hiccups brought on by the advent of fear and the presence of whiskey.

"No...see...I can't (hic) pay it, I've been robbed...the (hic) Reader is done for...just...just tell your employer to (hic) foreclose." His head was clearing a little bit, but he could still feel a heavy, persistent buzz at the front of his forehead, like someone had put a gyroscope just under the skin and set it to spinning. "I can't pay....I can't...(hic)...pay."

[Eades]

She stepped away from the desk for a moment, bending down to pick up one of the pages that had been left on the ground. While Peabody kept snivelling, she let her eyes slide down the page. Her frown only deepened. The Reader had been integral when she'd first arrived on Althanas. She'd found an abandoned issue in the gutter and if it hadn't been for the insight into Althanian culture and protocols, she might not have survived this long.

"What a damn shame," she muttered, pacing back to where Peabody was still hiccuping forlornly. Behind him, the press sat like a sleeping giant. Her brow arched as she looked down at the paper she held in her hand.

"Are you sure you're just going to call it quits? I mean, you technically have until the moment I break your legs to make amends." As she replaced the crowbar on her belt, she began to gather more papers, stacking them on the desk as she went. If she ended up having to do something violent tonight, she might as well do it in a neat environment.

It was better for the feng shui or something like that.

[Peabody Polk]

He tried desperately to concentrate, to let the fear subside and his more calculating parts find their way back to the front. It wasn't easy to do; alcohol and despair together had placed his thoughts in a twisted, hazy maze that was hard to disentangle. But with a force of effort and some held breath he suppressed his hiccups and opened his eyes. He willed his blurry vision to crystallize, and at last it did. But the headache would not go away so easily.

He stared at the young lady. There was no doubt she could break his legs. She had clearly broken a few already, and he was nothing more than a middle-aged entrepreneur gone soft from sitting at a writing-desk most of the time. "I can't make amends, that's the problem!"

He said it a bit too forcefully; far more aggressively than he had any right to in this situation. So he immediately followed it with, "Sorry, ma'am, but I just can't. I was gone on a trip, you see...to Salvar. Doing reporting on the civil war, you can tell from the proof sheets that I wasn't being lazy up there. I was sending those back by post to Jeremiah, my assistant, but he seems to have taken them and flown the coop. And so the money I should have made for the past few months...well, it's not here, but bills never stop."

Suddenly, as the woman was cleaning up the papers, he spotted an opened envelope. Something about it caught his eye: the address. Unlike the others, it was not addressed to "William James Pullhearst, c/o The Radasanthian Reader." It read, more simply, "To Jeremiah."

Sticking out his hand quickly, Peabody said, "Give me that. No, not that," he brushed aside a paper she passed him. "That. There, that's the ticket." He quickly opened the envelope; it wasn't hard, it had already been opened.

Peabody's jaw dropped. It was a letter, printed neatly in clear, concise font-setting.

Dearest Jeremiah,

Now that Pullhearst is gone, you need to disappear for a while, and make sure to take the evidence -- like this letter -- with you. Your help has been invaluable, letting me know the best places to put up papers and keeping track of Pullhearst's finances for me. In time, I should live to be a bit happier I sold that man the office space and the printing press I thought was a waste of time. With you gone, and nobody around to pay the bills, it's only a matter of time before I can legitimately send someone to...shall we say...politely request the money from Pullhearst.

When this is all over, you'll be the editor of the Reader, and I, its humble publisher. I'll pay you far better than your current salary, I'm sure.

Yours,

George B. Sellings

Peabody's head suddenly hurt far worse, and it wasn't from the whiskey. Leaning forward in his chair, dumbfounded, he let the letter fall from his hands and to the desk.

He'd been had.

[Eades]

Evangeline might not have noticed the letter if it had not fallen in such a way that set a neatly placed stack of unopened envelops askew. She came back from her latest and last acquisition of litter from the floor, stacked it onto the desk top and turned to tidy up the envelope pile when a name on the paper caught her eye. George B. Sellings wasn't someone she knew well, but it was someone she knew. In fact, she'd spoken to him once not long ago on the subject of some debt and the best way to recover it.

With fear.

Something was up, every nerve in her body told her so. So, she swept up the letter in her thin fingers, holding it up to one of the lights that seemed to twinkle without oil, and read. After she'd read and placed the letter down, she had to swallow to rid herself of the bad taste the whole affair left in her mouth.

"When I took this job, I knew it was basic thuggery," she said, crossing her arms. Her brow was furrowed, her grey eyes dark, her lips pursed thin with her displeasure. "However, there is a difference between handling a few matters with street law, and using dishonesty to send a man into ruins. I was a copper for a long time, Mr. Pullhearst. What is in this letter is plain wrong."

She took a stool from beside the press, shaking the dust off as she moved it beside the desk. Sitting down, she reached over to take one of the poor printer's hands within hers.

"Obviously Mr. Sellings wants to play his games with thuggery, but in my time there was one thing that couldn't be bullied out of it's place. The news brought all the dirt, real and imagined. I haven't been working for Mr. Sellers long, but I have been in the business of taking care of things for him and his associates for long enough to have heard things. Some quite true, some speculation, but none of these whispers are things that he would be happy to be in the public eye."

She sat back, her eyes twinkling with mischief.

"The Reader is here to inform the people. Now, surely there's enough ink in here to print many single pages, right? Not a full issue, just a few fliers. A public service announcement of sorts. A few little truths about Mr. Sellers that the patrons of the Bazaar might not know about. We have plenty of paper," she swept her hand at the desk, "and if it comes to it, we have absolute proof that this man is rotten to uphold our case. Your Jeremiah was witless enough to leave that behind.

"If we demonstrate that we have the power to do as much damage to his good name as he has to do to yours, I think a little thing such as a cease and desist would seem quite agreeable to him, don't you think?"

[Peabody Polk]

Peabody let his head fall forward into his hands. He had been in scrapes before, when his journalistic crusading took him up against the wealthy and the powerful, when he had championed noble thieves and exposed nobles acting like thieves. Never had his career put him on the right side of those in power, and he'd received death threats and survived at least two actual attempts to carry out the sentence. But even through tight financial times, he'd never gone into so much debt. And never -- never! -- had he been played for a fool and driven to the brink of ruin.

For a moment he didn't hear what the woman was saying. He imagined she was going to hit him there, a quick blow upside the head. If this man Sellings was willing to go to such great lengths to own and control property, there was no doubt in Peabody's mind that her orders were to kill him if he couldn't pay.

But then he realized what she'd said, and he looked up, a expression of frank wonder on his face. "You'd do that...you'd help me get back what's mine?"

He didn't really need the answer; he could see it written plain on the woman's face. She was sincere. And if she wasn't, if this was just one more trick to ruin his reputation, well, what did it matter? He was ruined either way, falling a little bit lower wouldn't hurt.

Leaping from his chair, he had to grab the corner of the desk to steady his stance. The booze still hadn't quite left his system; his vision leaped through hoops and he almost fell. Slowly catching his bearing, he said, "If you want to help, we'll have to work through the night. Here's the paper," he pushed about twenty thin sheets of parchment in her direction, each one large enough to provide at least one good copy of the Reader. Opening the drawer, he grabbed a pair of scissors and laid them on top of the stack.

"Start cutting; quarter each of those sheets, and then quarter each quarter, and we'll be able to make more pamphlets that way. And while you cut, talk to me about what the dirt is on Sellings."

He positioned himself at the press. Fast motions may have still made him sick enough to fall over, but he trusted in the dexterity of his hands. With focus, he could set the typeface so quickly and deftly; they would have over 400 fliers by morning. Well enough to coat the Bazaar stalls with tracts by dawn, with the best kept in reserve to threaten Sellings.

William James Pullhearst was in a bind. But now, for the first time during this whole awful night, he saw the way to squirm free of the bindings.

[Taskmienster]

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