Back in the citadel, the temperature was noticeably cooler. The stone walls had already started pulling the late-afternoon heat out of the air, and Beorn felt it change before he reached the first corridor.

The sounds in the kitchen soon came to his ears.

The noise had a familiar volume to it. Too many young people in one room after the evening meal, too much energy, and nobody caring about being too loud anymore. Voices overlapped in layers, someone had clearly started a discussion that had collapsed into laughter halfway through.

A sharp crack suggested a ceramic bowl hitting the floor, followed immediately by multiple people reacting at once. Over all of it came Aestrith’s voice, flat, completely drained of patience.

She repeated one instruction she had almost certainly already given multiple times, at exactly the same volume and in exactly the same tone.

Beorn laughed before he consciously decided to. The sound surprised him enough that he shook his head once and kept walking.

Heinrich’s office sat at the end of the administrative passage, the one that had once belonged to Eadric.

The lamp near the shelf was already lit, which told Beorn Heinrich had been working there for some time.

The desk immediately explained the rest.

There were separate stacks set by review stage, an open ledger turned toward a column of numbers, two record books placed spine-out for quick reuse instead of storage.

The city map, the one used for military deployments during the conflict lay folded on the secondary table to the left. Its edges were worn and softened from repeated use.

Heinrich stood when Beorn entered and resumed his seat before the greeting fully finished.

Even then, weeks of hard travel had not altered his posture at all. Beorn had noticed before that Heinrich’s bearing did not seem maintained through effort, but rather operated deeper than that, like habit trained too thoroughly to fade under fatigue.

"How are you finding the records?" Beorn asked.

Heinrich set down the quill first. There was a tinge of disbelief in his voice.

"I honestly have no idea how this city has not yet collapsed."

He paused briefly, likely deciding how directly to phrase the conclusion. "Ashmark is currently being governed through your continuous personal intervention across every critical category simultaneously. Food. Revenue. Population. Materials. Each system only works because you are manually stabilizing it. It quite literally is a situation that if you went sick for one single day, the whole city would implode."

Beorn pulled the second chair away from the wall and sat. Heinrich’s opinion tracked with his own concerns. The war had forced short-term control methods, and the problem was that short-term systems had become permanent.

"The conflict required it," Beorn noted indifferently. "What did you start with?"

Heinrich replied immediately. "The census. Everything else depends on accurate population figures."

He took a ledger page from the nearest stack and rotated it toward Beorn.

Two columns of figures filled most of the page. Along the lower margin, Heinrich had written compressed calculations tying the columns together.

"I used the food distribution records and the gate logs as the initial cross-reference sources."

Heinrich gestured to a few notes in the ledger. "Both already existed in some form, which made them the fastest way to acquire data. The food records track how many people receive allocations at each distribution point across the residential districts and the slums. The gate logs track every recorded entry into the city during the last months."

He tapped the lower margin. "The preliminary population floor derived from those two sources alone makes the eleven-year-old census unusable as an baseline. The discrepancy is too large for adjustment factors to correct. At this point the old census is historical reference material, nothing else."

Beorn leaned forward slightly, studying the numbers. The scale of the mismatch mattered more than the exact total. If Heinrich was right, then nearly every secondary decision in the city’s administration had been distorted from the beginning.

"Which district shows the largest variance from prior estimates?" Beorn asked.

"The slums, of course." Heinrich stated.

He rested one hand lightly against the page. "My estimate for the slums is currently a range rather than a figure, and the width of that range demonstrates how little administrative tracking was occurring."

Beorn looked at the margin calculations again. The old census had not simply drifted out of date, it had failed structurally years ago, and everyone using it had either ignored the problem or lacked the tools to replace it.

"I imagine then the food problem is more severe than the records show."

"Indeed." Heinrich nodded, "I could see you suspect as much due your repeated interventions."

The city was surviving because logistics were holding together under constant adjustment, not because the numbers made any sense.

Heinrich moved the first page into a completed stack and pulled a second ledger from the center of the desk.

"The revenue audit was what I expected from the protectorate history."

Heinrich gestured to the document. "The triangulation between your informal records and the mine foremen’s production reports created a discrepancy that is unsurprising in principle but significant in scale."

He glanced up at Beorn. "The effective revenue reaching this administration under the previous regime was approximately thirty percent of what total production justified."

Beorn stopped moving entirely. He expected it to be bad, horrible even, but only this much.

"Seventy percent missing."

"Across every self-reporting structure."

Heinrich confirmed. "Mines, trade route tolls, warehouse fees. Before your arrival, the protectorate effectively functioned as a puppet system for whichever parties controlled the reporting layer beneath it."

That explained why so many local power structures had resisted even basic oversight. The corruption had been the governing model.

"The auditor appointments are already drafted."

Heinrich continued. "Most candidates come from the merchant-educated population. Two additional candidates are former court administrators who arrived during the refugee influx."

He straightened the ledger slightly while speaking. "The limiting factor is preparation time. Mine output categories are specialized enough that I cannot deploy auditors who do not understand what they are reviewing."

Beorn considered the constraint. Incorrect auditors would create false numbers instead of accurate ones. That would be worse than delay.

He stood and crossed to the secondary table where the city conflict map rested. He unfolded it carefully across the surface and weighted the corners with nearby objects. A record book, the quill stand, two ink bottles.

The map still carried the marks of the conflict period beneath the newer additions. Original survey lines remained visible under layered revisions from Lewin’s network and Beorn’s administration.

District boundaries. Distribution points. Food cart routes. Militia positions.

Looking at it from above changed their perspective of the city entirely. It let him manage every district, every street, every wall as a whole and then broken into sections.

Beorn started to think over how he should develop Ashmark.