Moss Gods, Volcano Gods

This story is set on Ishveos' Eastern Hemisphere, far from the Wall.

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The Divine Accountant Ajoci Etta raised an eyebrow at the forest priestess.

“I’m sorry, you called me out here, six day’s ride from Wuchkiri on a golem carriage— a golem carriage with a limp, I should add, making for a truly miserable trip— for moss gods?”

The forest priestess cringed. “I know how it sounds, but the moss gods are important to this whole operation. Moss is important in any forest— it helps store nutrients to be distributed by fungus among trees and other plants, offers nurseries for trees to sprout, houses all sorts of insects, and most importantly, helps slow water runoff, and helps keep the forest humid. There’s no way we could maintain a forest of this size in land this arid without the moss, and no way we could maintain the moss without the moss gods.”

Ajoci closed her eyes, counted to five, then exhaled slowly.

Then she took a moment to carefully adjust her silken dress, her expensive relic jewelery, and her perfectly coiffed hair— the last of which didn’t need adjusting, of course, since it was being constantly maintained by the goddess living in her hairpin reliquary, but Ajoci’s adjustments were for the sake of her mental composure, not due to any actual dishevelment.

“There are,” Ajoci finally said, “hundreds of accountants in Wuchkiri you could have called for. At least two dozen other forensic accountants you could have summoned. I am, far and away, the most expensive of the lot. You have already cost yourself a fortune just reimbursing my travel time— and all for moss gods.”

“Well
” the priestess said. “You’re the ninth accountant we’ve brought out here, and each of them recommended you when they failed.”

Ajoci raised an eyebrow at that. “If the problem is really so complex, I begin to see why you might need me— but not why you need to keep matters so secretive. I’ve gone nearly mad trying to figure out what sort of job I’d been summoned to do. I can’t possibly imagine why you would need to be so secretive about moss.”

The forest priestess hesitated, then told Ajoci how many prayer-hours worth of soulstuff the missing moss was worth.

“Oh,” Ajoci said. “Oh.”

Ajoci had worked on larger jobs a handful of times— but only a handful.

And that was saying something, because Ajoci was the top forensic accountant in Wuchkiri— a city with more need for forensic accountants than most.

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Wuchkiri was a fabulously wealthy city— but also a city that ran on a financial knife’s edge.

Both of those facts were directly due to Wuchkiri being built into the caldera of an active volcano of the same name.

At first glance, it would have seemed like utter madness to do such a thing. And at second, third, and fifteenth glances, because it was utter madness. There were plenty of cities built around active volcanoes on Ishveos, and elsewhere in the multiverse— few other environments had richer soil, after all— but inside a caldera itself was an absurdity.

Wuchkiri’s mad construction had happened because of literal madness. A farmer’s son, possessed of a severe form of hereditary madness that struck in early adulthood and tended to skip generations, became convinced that there was immense wealth hidden in the volcanic caldera. He died, of course, choking on volcanic gases, but the god that was born from him, Anghsin, was a volcanic god, a god of heat redistribution and gas filtering.

And, well, the farmer’s son had been right about there being immense wealth in the caldera. The many hot springs bubbling up in the depths of the vast pit didn’t just produce toxic gases— they were also filled with dissolved minerals and metals. That was a far cry from the giant jewels he had been raving about, though.

In fairness to the mad in general, the farmer’s son had always been an idiot, even before his hereditary madness struck.

For a couple generations, Anghsin had merely supported mining operations, but even still, there were a great many casualties. Unlike most mines, however, the metals and minerals of the caldera kept renewing themselves through the hot springs, and over time, more and more gods started accumulating in the caldera.

And then, less than a half-century after the farmer’s son choked to death, there were enough gods in the volcanic caldera to support a small village on the rim. By the time a century went by, there was a large cliff-town built into the caldera walls. And fifty years after that, there was a whole city, wrapped around the rim, reaching down the caldera walls, and hanging suspended across the caldera.

The mining trade kept going the whole time, remaining massively profitable— it ended up being, among other things, the source of two-thirds of Ishveos’ platinum and an eighth of its iridium. That was only the beginning of Wuchkiri’s absurd fortune.

Next, of course, there were the croplands around the volcano— absurdly fertile, of course, and able to be exploited much more easily than other such lands, as the city didn’t need to fight for space with farmland, orchards, and vineyards. Those last became especially profitable, thanks to the unusual terroir of the soil imparted by the volcano’s unusual minerals, even compared to other volcanic soils.

On top of that, Wuchkiri sat no more than five miles from the sea, and an old, eroded volcanic caldera had formed a perfectly sheltered harbor, one that remained calm even during the fiercest storms— and lay not only on a major trade route, but close to the migration path of a large number of the more predictable floating isles, as well as possessing some of the richest fishing grounds on the moon. As if that weren’t enough good fortune, it was an easy month-long journey overland to the great stilt-city of Telishan, and not much farther to several smaller cities.

Even the gods birthed in Wuchkiri seemed to be brought by the greatest fortune, because by the four-hundredth anniversary of Anghsin’s birth, there were no less than three dozen important gods in the city whose godgifts were valuable enough to be worthy goals for pilgrimages by themselves.

Wuchkiri was not quite so wealthy as Far Selantur, and only a tiny speck in comparison to Cambrias’ Wall, but there were only a bare handful of other living cities that even rivaled its wealth.

For all that, Wuchkiri perpetually teetered on the edge of disaster and bankruptcy— not due to mismanagement, but due to the sheer, absurd costs of maintaining a city inside an active volcanic caldera. A dozen cities could have been maintained with the prayer cost of filtering the volcanic gases away from residents, of protecting homes from the frequent minor quakes, of harnessing the heat to the city’s advantage, and above all else, of preventing eruptions.

To say that there was a lot of room for fraud and embezzlement in that theonomic chaos was drastically understating things.

It was a miracle attributable to no one god, but to the city’s bureacracy, that it had survived as long as it had.

Ajoci was convinced that, as much as it was possible for any one person to understand the city’s finances, she did. Of course, even her brilliant mind— she was no close friend of humility— and extensive cognitive boons, powered by all the might of her Divine soul, couldn’t give her a truly comprehensive grasp. But as much as any one person could understand the city, she thought she had.

And now she was finding that she had somehow gone her whole life without finding out about one of Wuchkiri’s single most valuable industries, one that out-earned many of the farmland’s crops.

And it was all contained in a little forested valley that could be hiked across in a few hours.

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The very first question Ajoci asked was about which other accountants had been summoned thus far. Their names might tell her a lot about how to proceed initially in her investigation— and also stoke her ego, if she could solve it when they couldn’t.

That taken care of, the forest priestess, Jianka, led Ajoci on a quick tour of the forest. Ajoci paid only half a mind to the admittedly beautiful trees, streams, and ponds, and even less to the heavily armed guards, many Saints, hidden throughout the forest. No, Ajoci kept her attention primarily trained on Jianka’s own words.

This was a financial mystery, in the end. The answer would come from the people of the forest, human or god, not from niche questions of thecological balance.

Of the forest? Working for the forest? Ajoci found herself somewhat confused of the exact relationship, of whether this was a business or some odd but harmless religious sect.

They stopped by a pleasant little streamside glade for lunch, where servants had spread out a blanket for them to sit on and left a basket of cheeses, nuts, and berries. Only empty cups, though, no drinks— a mystery solved when Jianka simply filled their cups from the burbling brook. That simple act impressed Ajoci more than almost anything else about the forest thus far— they weren’t far from agricultural lands, keeping the stream pure enough to drink from would be a tricky act, one not achievable by brute theological force.

After they ate, Jianka handed Ajoci a folder filled with names.

The accountant took a moment to inspect the folder itself before opening it. Carved, or perhaps grown, from wood, fit together with wooden pegs from the same tree. Delicate, intricate inlays of different woods stretched across the front— an impressive achievement, given that the folder wasn’t particularly thick. It did seem to be blessed for strength, but

“This was made here in the forest?” Ajoci asked.

Jianka nodded. “We have a minor sideline in high-end woodwares. It’s quite profitable, but mostly serves as a cover for our real industries.”

“Doesn’t that sound familiar,” Ajoci murmured, then opened the folder.

The first page was a list of names. Later pages were full profiles on each of the names, followed by brief financial summaries of the forest’s business, and then written notes by the accountants who had come before Ajoci.

Ajoci skimmed through all of it, though a more careful reading would have to wait for later.

“These are all the potential suspects,” Jianka said. “Everyone working for the forest who could have been behind the prayer embezzlement.”

“And you’re sure it wasn’t simply someone stealing the moss off the trees?”

Jianka nodded. “We’ve had that happen a couple times, there is a small market for certain mosses that make excellent linings for diapers and the like. They just strip the moss entirely off branches, then. No, this is more subtle, just patches of moss not growing as much as they should have on their prayer budgets.”

Ajoci looked over the names again. “And you’re the highest ranked priestess who isn’t implicated, I take it?”

Jianka blushed awkwardly. “Unfortunately, yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I do have some good news for you,” Ajoci said. “It wasn’t any of the suspects on this list.”

Jianka gave her a confused look. “How can you know that?”

Ajoci smiled. “I may be the best accountant in Wuchkiri, but you made some good choices before me. All are meticulous, careful accountants. No, if the others didn’t catch your embezzler, it wasn’t one of the suspects.”

“No one else could possibly have done it,” Jianka protested. “Our security forces carried out a thorough investigation.”

Ajoci carefully ran her fingers across the pages in the folder, noting the high quality and deliberate, artful roughness of the paper.

“This is another product of the forest?” Ajoci asked.

“The paper and ink both, yes— the paper made partly of deadfall wood, partly of special lichens we plant to prepare the way for the mosses; and the ink of blessing-treated oak gall,” Jianka said. “Both decent moneymakers. But ma’am, it has to be someone on the list. It absolutely, cannot possibly be anyone else.”

“In my experience, Jianka, possibility is seldom so limiting,” Ajoci said. “But I certainly have no reason to disbelieve you for now— I find it likely that you’ve successfully narrowed down the list to every viable person of interest.”

“How can it be no one on the list and no one off the list?” Jianka demanded, showing genuine irritation for the first time.

Ajoci smiled. “Because your security forces only investigated the humans on this list, and completely ignored the gods.”

Jianka blinked at her. “The gods? Of course they ignored the gods, gods can’t steal or cheat.”

Ajoci picked up one of the remaining pieces of cheese, a soft cheese marbled with veins of green. This, at least, she knew did not belong to the forest— she had once worked for the dairy that had produced it, a lovely little place located atop a hill a few miles out from Wuchkiri. Not as an accountant— she’d worked summers there as a child with her brother, to save up pocket money. In between her summer job and her rise to prominence, though, she’d been unable to afford the cheese for years.

Now, of course, she could eat it all she wanted.

“Gods must always pay their debts,” Ajoci said. “This is the only thing they must do. They do not cheat only insofar as they always give the gifts they have promised— but nothing stops them from, for example, subtly lying about the utility of the gift save the threat of reputational damage. And they can, with sufficient cleverness and preparation, absolutely cheat, steal, and embezzle. It is rarer and more difficult than it is for humans, but do not be mistaken— it does happen.”

Jianka looked taken aback by this, as though she had never even considered the matter— which most people, in Ajoci’s experience, had not.

“Fortunately for you,” Ajoci continued, “you happen to be seated in the company of a specialist in that very circumstance. A brilliant, beautiful, peerless specialist.”

She smiled, then popped the cheese into her mouth.

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Ten years ago, Ajoci Etta had been no one of any importance whatsoever. Just a dirt-poor graduate of one of Wuchkiri’s two accounting schools, and not the better one. She lived in a cramped, humid little apartment nestled among the pipes running along the back of one of Wuchkiri’s countless bathhouses, which, contrary to most bathhouses, needed no heating of their water— no, indeed, they often needed to cool it through the mechanism of pumping it through mineral-crusted condenser pipes.

And as a result of its unfortunate location, Ajoci’s apartment was perpetually humid and moist, its temperature always too warm for comfort.

It was all Ajoci could afford on the meagre bureaucrat’s salary she drew, especially considering the expensive body reshaping she was saving up for. Not that she had a body-soul mismatch, unlike her twin brother— no, Ajoci was just vain, and unashamed to admit it.

It was some months into the Steam Pressure Crisis before Ajoci and the other low-level accountants working for the Wuchkiri Republic were called in to help try and manage the crisis— though, admittedly, most of them had been aware for weeks that something was up, not least due to the number of senior accountants who had taken over the grunt-work and number shuffling on several major accounts that they would normally never stoop to doing.

Ajoci was one of the few junior accountants who hadn’t suspected something was up. This was an unusual situation— though she only had two lonely cognitive boons at this point in her life, one that boosted her retention of numbers into her long-term memory, and one that helped her focus through long shifts at work, she remained nonetheless a keen mind.

Ajoci’s lack of suspicion was simply a matter of distraction, of a passionate love affair that burned fiercely, and snuffed itself out quickly. And, in all honesty, Ajoci’s damp apartment had been a contributing factor to the relationship’s collapse.

So when she was shuffled onto the investigation, tasked with aiding in the hunt for the solution to the excess steam pressure, it was a great surprise to her— though not an unwelcome one, for she had needed a distraction from heartbreak.

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The nameless, mossy little forest had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of gods. The forest priests hadn’t ever bothered to fully catalog their number— a silly, unfortunate oversight, to Ajoci’s mind, but a common one. Few places could be bothered to keep track of every god of individual trees or boulders.

But this crime would not, could not have been pulled off by a god so small. There were fundamental size limitations at work here— the amount of prayer-debt necessary to grow the missing moss was simply too large for any small god to handle.

So, while Jianka’s compatriots assembled a list of the gods large enough to perform the theft, the priestess herself brought Ajoci to see the source of the forest’s vast wealth.

It was a modest little plant, one tucked partially under the shelter of a large fallen log covered in moss, fungus, and smaller plants. It poked up out of a patch of short, piebald moss almost abashedly, with seven-lobed leaves and forgettable little white flowers.

“Worth more than its weight in gold, then,” Ajoci commented.

“Many, many times more,” Jianka agreed.

“And what makes this little plant so valuable, then?”

“Heartrush is
” Jianka paused and blushed before continuing, “the main ingredient in an unusually powerful aphrodisiac.”

Ajoci raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows at that. “There are folks willing to pay for herbal aphrodisiacs, when there are plenty of reliable godgift aphrodisiacs?”

Jianka shifted uncomfortably. “This
 this one plant can replace several hundred or even thousand powerful blessings.”

Ajoci’s eyebrows shot even higher, and she inspected the innocuous little plant more closely. “Now that seems
 unusual and improbable.”

“It’s not from Ishveos,” Jianka said, sounding much more comfortable. “It was bred on some world with horticultural magics, and requires highly specific soil and environmental conditions. No one’s ever been able to successfully farm it on Ishveos before— mimicking the forest environments it was bred for is the only way to handle it. It’s so delicate and picky a plant that even the most cautious flora cultivation godgifts tend to ruin it. You simply have to mimic its preferred environment, there’s no other way.”

“So that’s why the forest has such high environmental maintenance costs,” Ajoci said, stepping away from the heartrush.

“Precisely,” Jianka replied.

Ajoci frowned at the twigs and bits of humus that had tangled in the lace of her skirt, and gave it a little shake. The boons in the fabric activated, and the organic debris slid off, leaving the skirt pristine white once more.

“Let’s take a look at this list, shall we?” Ajoci suggested.

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The explanation for the Steam Pressure Crisis was, of course, godly prayer embezzlement. No matter how huge the crises had been, Ajoci would never have gained so much fame if there had been merely human culprits— even in Wuchkiri, accounting was far from the most glamorous field.

And yet, Ajoci made it so, by being the only accountant brilliant— or perhaps foolish enough— to investigate the gods of the city as potential culprits.

When Wulbian the Bellows Tender’s perfidy was uncovered, Ajoci hadn’t just saved the city from the risk of further steam explosions, from the risk of the death toll rising from dozens to hundreds. No, she offered the city an excuse to remove a long-lasting inefficiency. Wulbian offered gifts of enhanced stamina and heat resistance to workers, allowing them to work long shifts manually pumping steam bellows, venting pressure out of the volcano. It was a colossal waste of money, labor, and space— there were far better options, one that were simultaneously more efficient and more robust, with larger profit margins and larger spending on safety. There was no good reason Wulbian’s Bellows were still in function, save one— Wulbian’s age.

Wulbian was one of the first gods born in the early days of mining in the caldera, when the filter-mining techniques were still rough and difficult. It had been decades until any decent competitor gods to Wulbian had been spawned, and by then, Wulbian had a colossal entrenched advantage— not just in raw size, but in institutional inertia. Wulbian could leverage his position to disproportionate extent, throwing his theological weight around with little concern for others.

There were few in the city who didn’t have some complaint towards the Bellows god. Workers, for his strident anti-union activity, refusal to offer boons instead of blessings, and his suppression of wages. Competing gods, chafing at the limited market for their services. Builders, for the gratuitous amounts of limited caldera real estate taken up by the Bellows god’s huge facilities. The city government and other large theonomic concerns, for the high prices demanded by Wulbian.

The free theonomic market fanatics will never stop claiming that situations like Wulbian’s should be prevented by unregulated prayer markets, and yet they just keep happening, don’t they?

So when an unknown young accountant named Ajoci Etta unveiled a hellishly complex godgift-futures shorting scheme planned out by Wulbian to make a fortune for himself, the whole city rejoiced, even as Wulbian’s reliquary was hauled into a deep vault to starve. Wulbian protested his innocence even as the vault was sealed around him, of course.

Even some of the best accountants in the city struggled to fully follow Wulbian’s scheme, and for her brilliant work, Angshin himself, far and away the wealthiest god in the city, rewarded Ajoci with enough prayer-debt to not only pay for her body reshaping and that of her twin brother’s, but to raise her to Sainthood, as well.

And from there, Ajoci’s rise only continued.

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Sorting through the list of moss gods took not only the rest of the day, but well through the morning of the next as well, which greatly irked Ajoci. She’d been sleeping in roadside inns for days, and not even their best rooms compared to her own quarters back in Wuchkiri. For that matter, she hadn’t gotten laid in over a week, and she hadn’t encountered anyone who was even close to beautiful enough to warrant her attentions on this trip so far.

Ajoci’s quarters in the forest were, of course, on a bed stuffed with moss— which, to her surprise, was far and away the most comfortable she had encountered on this trip so far, if not quite up to the standards of her own wildly expensive reliquary bed.

The reason the moss gods took so long wasn’t due to their sheer number— there were only a few dozen of them. No, it was due to the fact that Ajoci didn’t know anywhere near enough about mosses.

Take, for instance, the fact that four wind gods were included among the ranks of the moss gods. Ajoci had considered it a mistake before Ajoci took her out into the forest to explain. Simply put, mosses lacked internal circulatory systems like proper plants, and so were much more dependent on humidity and moisture to survive. As a consequence of that, their life-cycle was dependent on a particular quirk of wind— it tended to die down near surfaces.

If someone were to lay down on the ground on a hot day, they would swiftly grow even more hot and uncomfortable— not because of the heat of the ground, but because the wind swiftly lost its energy to friction against the ground, leaving a layer of much stiller air at the boundary. Moss depended on this effect to survive, because wind evaporated moisture off the moss, and its lack allowed moss better growing conditions. Rougher ground or tree bark had thicker layers of still air, allowing for taller, lusher moss to grow.

So those four wind gods existed to help extend the layer of still air, to promote further moss growth. And given that Ishvean gods weren’t particularly good at meddling with the weather— quite bad, really, compared to the magics of other universes— their required budgets to achieve this were absolutely colossal.

Really, this proved to be the case across the board. The moss budget for the forest was disproportionately expensive, an across-the-board inefficiency that would have gotten the axe in any normal business.

Here, though, the ecosystem services of the mosses were essential. Not only did they act as nutrient stores, and to help preserve humidity, but they helped defend trees from pests, acted as spawning grounds for many insects, and there was one particular moss species that acted as the preferred nursery for the heartrush.

“Maybe some plants just don’t want to grow,” Ajoci complained at one point, to Jianka’s horror.

The moss situation wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed, at first glance— for instance, once they were growing well, their rough shapes helped contribute to the air-stilling performed by the wind gods in a positive feedback loop. It remained, nonetheless, probably the most disproportionately expensive part of the forest to maintain. Mosses were picky about where they would grow, nearly impossible to transplant, and grew immensely slowly. They did, at least, tend to be fairly hardy— many of them could survive being completely dried out for years at a time. Jianka claimed that one species present in the forest could survive two centuries without water, not that the forest priests would let their mosses go more than a few days about it.

Ajoci had given her a skeptical look at that, but it wasn’t her job to wonder at the marvels of nature, only to figure out how they might play into a prayer embezzlement scam.

In the end, the very inefficiency of the moss gods was probably why the scam had originated there. The forest priests were used to gross over-expenditures and wild variances in the amount of prayer needed to maintain their moss, and didn’t expect it to break even on its own, or even be particularly profitable. The few mosses they sold just defrayed costs, really.

Well, no. Ajoci realized the real function of the sold mosses, as well as the other minor side-industries of the forest when she was being shown a variety of nut grown in the forest, the total yearly sales of which wouldn’t even maintain a single family in poverty. No, all these assorted goods existed as camoflauge, to prevent the public from realizing the nameless little forest was the source of heartrush.

All that aside, it fit that the scam would pop up in the low margins. They so often seemed to crop up where the margins were low or high. One of these years, Ajoci needed to hire some statistician priests to go through all the financial crime data she could get her hands on and figure out which was the most likely end of the pond for these things to occur in.

Ajoci scowled, then began reading about the gods responsible for watershed management in the forest.

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The years after Ajoci solved the Steam Pressure Crisis had been heady ones. She rapidly solved case after case, and gained a reputation for being the expert in godcrime, at least of the financial sort, in Wuchkiri. She was even summoned to several neighboring cities to help crack cases there.

And while she spent truly prodigiously on her own body modifications, and those for her brother, she also invested massively into her soul, driving her rapid ascension towards Divinity. She almost always took her pay in boons, blessings, and drudge-prayer, rather than gemstones. Partially because gemstone-based currency tended towards volatility— while they might be largely immune to mimic-based counterfeiting, their supply was much harder to control than proper currencies. Mostly, though, she chose godgifts and prayer-debt for pay because growing your soul was the best investment an individual could make.

Ajoci became Divine just three months before her thirtieth birthday, a feat only matched by heirs of existing Divines.

As she grew wealthier, more beautiful, and more famous, her brother grew taller, burlier, and more settled. She solved financial mystery after financial mystery, he took a job on a farm. She turned glamorous and flamboyant, he became turned taciturn and serious.

Ajoci approved immensely of the whole situation— it suited her sense of symmetry well, that the two of them would undertake such inverse detours from their once-identical forms, yet still maintained a close relationship. They grew farther and farther from one another, while still maintaining strong sibling bonds.

And then it was just Ajoci, drifting away from her original form alone.

It had been a simple farm accident, a cart that came loose. There was no one to blame, no justice to be found, just blind cruel luck. If it had been one of Ajoci’s many enemies who had targeted him, one of the pampered rich assholes she had deposed over the years, it would have appealed to her sense of narrative more, have given her purpose, let her dwell in a righteous guilt.

She made sure the haystack god born from her twin's death was well-worshipped, but she seldom visited him herself. He wasn't her brother, just a painful reminder.

And so she was left with only a nebulous sort of guilt. Illogically blaming herself for paying for his body reshaping, for
 well, she found a lot of silly reasons to pretend it was somehow her fault.

And a few less-silly reasons. Ajoci was hardly without regrets.

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It took two and a half weeks for Ajoci to solve the case.

So far as her usual jobs went, this wasn’t particularly long. Investigative accounting, no matter how powerful one’s cognitive boons were, was seldom a particularly fast process.

In most cases, though, Ajoci only worked a regular shift. Here, though, with little to do but work and seduce the prettier forest priests— who she would normally never look at twice— she found herself working twelve hours a day or more. By the end of those weeks, she had put in much more work than she would have on any normal case.

“You gave me the answer when I first met you,” Ajoci told Jianka, as they walked through the forest. “Specifically, you said that ‘Moss is important in any forest— it helps store nutrients to be distributed by fungus among trees and other plants, offers nurseries for trees to sprout, houses all sorts of insects, but most importantly, helps slow water runoff, and helps keep the forest humid.’ Does that ring any bells?”

“You memorized my exact words?” Jianka asked.

Ajoci rolled her eyes. “I have cognitive boons for that. Please try to keep up.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Jianka said. “But I don’t see where you’re going with all this.”

Ajoci sighed. “It’s the fungus. The fungus gods are the ones doing the thefts.”

Jianka frowned in confusion, to which Ajoci sighed, and spread out a sheaf of papers on a nearby set of fallen logs.

“It’s the nutrients carried between mosses and trees by the fungus networks,” Ajoci said. “The fungus gods have been taking a larger share for their fungus than is their due, and using that to fuel growth and upkeep, instead of the prayer designated for their task, which they’re redirecting to their own growth.”

She carefully took the young priestess through the numbers, detailing the general shape of the embezzlement.

Halfway through, Jianka’s head jerked up in alarm. “Wait, the fungus gods could be listening to us, we
”

Ajoci laughed. “Oh, now you think of that. Not to worry, I have anti-eavesdropping boons active. If anyone is trying to listen to us, they’re going to just be catching almost-discernible syllables and getting a mild headache.”

She moved to return to the explanation, but Jianka stopped her. “No, I believe you. I’ve seen enough to call a council. At this point, the only topics of conversation are what to do about the offending gods, how to move forward, and probably of most interest to you, what form you would prefer your payment in.”

Ajoci smiled— she was sure she’d need to explain the case at least a couple more times, so she wasn’t going to complain about Jianka trusting her here.

“I can’t tell you how to manage your religion,” Ajoci said, “but I can, at the least, share stories about how previous, similar cases of mine have played out. You’ll likely want to crack down on the offenders, but doing so too hard can end up with
 regrettable consequences.”

She paused and looked around her. “As for my pay
 you know, I’ve been thinking. And by thinking, I mean I’ve been carefully reviewing some of the memories I’ve stored in my cognitive boons— memories of Wuchkiri. There is a ridiculous amount of moss inside the volcano, most of which I just never noticed or paid attention to before this.”

Jianka nodded, looking a little confused. “Yes, I’ve been there a few times. It’s all the moisture, and the fact the city has been repressing eruptions for centuries to allow the moss time to grow. Give it another few decades, a century at most, and most of the inside of the crater will be green.”

“Caldera, darling,” Ajoci corrected her, with a wince. Calling Wuchkiri a crater was a sure way to irritate Wuchkirins. “It’s a caldera, not a crater.”

“Yes ma’am,” Jianka said. “But I don’t see where you’re going with all this.”

Ajoci smiled. “I’ll be taking my pay in moss boons.”

“Moss boons? What does an accountant need with moss boons?” Jianka asked.

“Well, not for me,” Ajoci said. “For my employees.”

Jianka didn’t look any less confused.

“You didn’t think I reached Divinity and grew this fabulously wealthy purely from accounting work, did you, dear?” Ajoci asked. “No, I’ve started a half-dozen businesses since first rising to Sainthood. And if this trip has shown me anything, it’s that the Wuchkirin business community is drastically underestimating the financial utility of moss.”

“Like what?” Jianka asked, looking only a bit less confused.

Ajoci tapped the young priestess on the nose with a finger. “You’re a clever girl, you can figure it out. You can’t expect me to share my business plans so freely, really. Unless, of course, you’d like to come work for me in the big, glamorous city— and get paid far better than you are now. For as much money as this little forest makes, its clergy is ridiculously undervalued.”

Ajoci had just been joking, not expecting Jianka to seriously consider it, but the girl hesitated, visibly conflicted.

The accountant smiled, and hooked her arm through Jianka’s. “Let’s take the long route to the forest council building, shall we? We can talk about the benefits of working for me. And I’ve still got those anti-eavesdropping boons up, so no need to worry about getting in trouble.”

It was, perhaps, not entirely ethical to poach the employees of her clients like this— but then, Ajoci had never been the most concerned with being entirely ethical.

Ethics, after all, seldom made one rich.

-----------------------------------------

There was a reason so few people could follow the logic of the Steam Pressure embezzlement scheme, why it was so complex and arcane.

And that reason was fairly simple— the whole thing was oxshit. Made up. Utter hogwash, to steal a phrase from Ajoci’s dearly missed twin brother.

A young, ambitious, and hungry accountant had made the whole thing up.

Oh, not the Steam Pressure Crisis itself. That had been very real, as was the fact that it was driven by godcrime. But the details, the tangled web of prayer transactions?

Stitched together with delicate hands from real facts, to form a false crime.

Wulbian had protested his innocence so hard for one simple reason— he had been innocent.

The actual culprit was none other than Angshin himself, the first of the caldera gods, born from the mad son of a farmer centuries ago.

Everyone assumed that godly schemes had to be brilliant, cunning, and near-undetectable. And some were. The scheme by the fungus gods? That had been all three, with the added benefit of having few moving parts.

Angshin hadn’t done nearly so well concealing his scheme. Really, the only reason no one had discovered him was because no one was looking before Ajoci.

To this day, she still wasn’t entirely sure what had convinced her to start investigating the city’s gods. Probably just the fact that there were so many accountants auditing the human suspects.

She’d figured out it was Angshin within a week— and then spent several more weeks weaving the fake embezzlement scheme from real transaction records.

Angshin’s scheme was even simpler, albeit less subtle, than that of the fungus gods.

He’d simply been dumping excess heat into pipes that weren’t supposed to carry it, leaving the whole water system overheated, instead of performing the correct, and more expensive, procedures. This left the god with a larger prayer margin to reinvest into himself for months.

Of course, he hadn’t been completely foolhardy about his scheme, and Ajoci had to pore over the records from a half-dozen different city departments to figure it out— including the civil engineering department. And while Ajoci was spectacular with numbers, figuring out temperature trends within the civil engineering records and comparing them to estimated growth rates of major gods from the financial temple reports had been a real pain in her ass.

Angshin hadn’t been careful enough, though, and the city’s water system had suffered several fatal steam explosions. Someone would have to pay, someone would have to be punished for it all.

If Ajoci had simply reported Angshin’s misdeeds, perhaps she might have received a promotion— but she certainly wouldn’t have gotten rich, have risen to fame. More likely, she would have been caught up in political turmoil, have her career ruined by the damage an Angshin-centered scandal would have done to the city. Because while Wulbian might be largely disliked across the city, Angshin was not only both well-liked and the largest god of the city, but also central to Wuchkiri’s foundational myth.

Her career ruined, at the very least. Committing an oddly suspicious suicide with no warning signs seemed more likely. Often-times, in the years that followed, she wondered if she really had been the first to figure out Angshin’s crime, or whether other accountants had spotted it and wisely chose to back away.

So instead of risking everything, she’d offered Angshin a way out. A convenient, ready-made scapegoat that the city would be delighted to be rid of.

And so Wulbian, nasty as he may be, was innocent. Condemned to execution-by-starvation for the benefit— no, the profit— of Ajoci and Angshin.

She told herself, afterwards, that she’d extorted so much prayer-debt from Angshin to make herself into less of a threat. Certainly, she enjoyed the fruits of obscene wealth, but it also made her into a known quantity, a useful tool with useful levers. There were risks there too, of course— she had to convince Angshin that she wouldn’t simply keep blackmailing him over time. That, she handled through a combination of personal charm, giving Angshin proof that she had faked Wulbian’s crimes so that mutually assured destruction protected them both, and relying on Angshin’s recommendations to help her find more work in the future.

It had worked out brilliantly for both of them.

And yet, in the years since her brother’s death, Ajoci couldn’t help but think of Wulbian, starving down in the dark, whenever she thought of her beloved twin. Some part of her kept insisting that her brother’s death was the wage of her crime— and not the last of it.

No matter how much she tried to convince herself that her brothers’ death wasn’t her fault, that the universe didn’t work that way, that no universe worked that way, that part of her mind just wouldn’t be quiet.

So Ajoci did her best to drown that little part of herself, that mocking little voice. In fine wines and recreational godgifts, in torrid love affairs and absurd shopping sprees. She took challenging case after challenging case, and solved them all. Her fortune kept rising and rising, and she soon owned debt ledgers that dwarfed the schemes she regularly broke wide.

She never faked a crime again, kept
 fairly close to ethical grounds. Certainly, she toed closer to the line than her competitors.

And she just kept waiting for her wealth to outweigh her guilt, for that little voice to drown under her vast fortune.

Surely, someday it would be enough.

Surely.