I confess to being constantly surprised as to the various hobbies that usurers take up as a form of relaxation. I have known one who made the barrels for barrel organs. I have known usurers who turned to fishing, poetry, adultery, and strong drink. Sometimes all of them in the same evening.

But Grievous Tap has perhaps the strangest, if only because it is so similar to how he spends his days. He will sit all day in his office, totting up columns of figures, cross-examining supplicants and smiling benevolently to those who come to make a deposit. He sits at a table piled high with papers, ledgers bound in hide, deeds to properties written on vellum. Rumour hints that some of the documents that pass across his desk are older than the city of Port Naain. Others claim that he holds the deeds to ‘desirable properties’ situated within demon…