“Have you not realized by now?” said Luther. “Someone did notice. In fact, not only did they notice, they helped me. But not because they wanted to, of course.”
Helen put it together. This was why the Minister of Finance and the Lord High Treasurer had fled. Luther bribed or coerced them. Either way, it didn’t make much difference now. She moved on to a more important question. “What did you do with the money you removed?”
“That was the real challenge. I had no great need of the money, myself. If anything, it was a burden and a risk to keep around. I considered throwing it all into a volcano, but that would have required quite a bit of manpower, and frankly, I doubted that any reasonable person would perform such a task for me without succumbing to temptation. In the end, I gave some of it away to the less fortunate. I would have liked to give more, but too much would have surely drawn attention from the media, so the rest went to Abolish for their services. It would seem I did not get my money’s worth on that front, but then again, I knew I was overpaying from the beginning.”
Abolish. She would have liked to go a while longer without hearing that name again. If they had the money, there was no telling where it was now. She didn’t even know if any of them had survived the Battle at Rathmore. Harper hadn’t been able to tell her how many he killed.
She intended to press Luther for details, but she didn’t expect to learn anything else of use, and indeed, that proved to be the case. She decided to leave before Luther wasted any more of her time.
Mehlsanz followed her up the prison stairs. ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘...I am open to suggestions.’
‘Wow. It’s that bad, huh?’
‘If you have any ancient wisdom for me, now would be the time.’
‘I’m not sure I have any ancient wisdom that’s worth two hundred billion troas.’
‘I thought as much.’
A dark serial novel. Set in a modern fantasy world called Eleg. Mature language. Updates every night at midnight PST by ~400 words.