The World Dragon's Heir - Chapter 775: Calculated Payment

In fact, there was a summary page. A very detailed one. Not only had the information been compiled by Julio, he had both of their accountants work the numbers for him so that they could be properly presented and pass even Royal scrutiny.

There wouldn’t be anything worse for their reputation as professionals than to have the tax assessors find an error and think that they were trying to scam the Royal Treasury.

The pair working on the assessment that day were doing their job properly, if only giving the numbers a cursory glance, checking random calculations and not everything in the list as they would for a standard audit or most collections.

Instead, they rushed through the process, and tried not to be too envious about the fact that their boss got to drink fine wine and chat with the Duke about the war, the crops and everything in between.

Duke Dominic was one of the easiest Nobles that they had ever had to deal with. Not only did he have the numbers prepared for them, he was also not trying to maximize deductions.

They had taken the basic deductions, enough that they weren’t simply giving money away. But most of those were related to population change, and Wistover hadn’t had its full population for most of this year.

They also hadn’t done a formal census yet, though they had the data collected by the Malton Knights.

That didn’t make any real difference to them. The census was only done once a decade, and the rest were all estimates anyhow, self reported by the Nobles. There was bound to be some level of discrepancy.

Just seeing these numbers would cause Palace gossip anyhow.

According to these numbers, there were now thirty thousand people living in the immediate vicinity of Wistover, and another forty thousand spread through the Baronies.

He couldn’t tell how much of that was the city itself and how much was small tenant farmers working a virgate or less.

If it was mostly farmers working a dozen acres with a large family, it wouldn’t be difficult to have ten thousand people reported in the area. Still, that left a lot of people in the city. Twenty thousand people into a city in a year was a catastrophe for most cities.

But here in Wistover, the auditors could see out the window that new factory roofs were everywhere, steam rose into the air with no sign of coal smoke, while a rustic city centre still had old cobblestone and slate houses.

It was an odd mix of old and new, overlaid by subtle signs of magic.

There were magitech sprinklers attached to water barrels under the eaves of houses, watering gardens and lawns. There were magitech buses running the streets, and what the auditors were reasonable certain was a magitech hoverboard.

It was actually a levitation spell on a surfboard, not magitech. But the mage who came up with the idea was incredibly proud of it, as it let him bypass the crowded streets to fly low over town using wind magic.

The outsiders didn’t know that he was considered eccentric, even by the standards of the other mages.

All that they knew was that they could see someone literally flying on a hoverboard as a method of transportation through town that made the abundance of bicycles look absolutely mundane.

And there were a lot of bicycles.

They were being made at a shop in town, with assistance from the Sands Sect, who made the rubber tires for them. The mages had come up with an ingenious way to make bicycles more reliable, in their estimation.

Instead of inflated tires, which often got flats, or hard rubber tires, which were brutal to ride on, they used the same softer outer shell as an inflated tire, but filled with stiff rubber foam.

You just stretched them over the rim, and they would support a person’s weight with relative ease.

Of course, you couldn’t inflate them more to carry two heavier people, or a lot of cargo. But they were still good for most situations with one rider and under fifty kilos of goods.

They were also cheap.

The techno wizard who was making them had basic transmutation magic, so he just went down to the river once a month, loaded up a wagon with silt mud to dry, and used that to make his bicycles.

The end result was that he could sell the bicycles for the equivalent of three days wages at the fireplace factory.

Not an insignificant purchase, but affordable.

By dinner, they had the numbers run, and the calculation appeared to be correct, going by the Duchy’s own estimates. And, they had even included the payment from the Baronies in their transfer proposal.

That might actually cause some concern in the Capital.

Most of those men were decorated war heroes, so hearing that they were already willing to put up the proceeds of their first harvest to help the nation through its recovery was bound to be the sort of sympathy inducing tale of selflessness that immediately sounded alarm bells in the mind of politicians.

As it definitely should.

Keeping in the good graces of the King was only one small aspect of what was going to happen when they made the transfer.

Paying their taxes wasn’t anything special. But paying in food when half the nation was recovering from a failed crop would mean much more to the common folk, and when it came time for them to consider their next purchase, they would remember the name of Wistover Duchy.

A name that was emblazoned on the boxes of all the products shipped out of the city’s factories.

It was a brilliant bit of marketing, and Dominic hadn’t even considered it when he had agreed to use the pretense of a tax payment to solve their overfilled storage issues. The important part was that they were going to be able to ship out more than the Merchant’s Guild was willing to purchase for resale, so they could keep everything flowing smoothly.