Ledgerbound Auditor

The Black Ledger Hall of Old Harwick once employed ordinary auditors to keep track of bridge tolls and guild dues, but after years of bribery and forged invoices, the masters commissioned a final safeguard. The resulting construct was bound with oath-ink distilled from sworn confessions and fed a name list of every debtor the guild wanted remembered. It does not ask who belongs in the hall. It asks only whether the papers are in order. In the years since, desperate thieves learned that the thing guarding the records was often more honest than the men who built it.