Maraganha said; and Arekhon replied, “It isn’t. But the money I’ve saved here on Entibor isn’t going to do me any good back on Eraasi.” “Don’t spend all of it,” she told him. “You never know what may happen.” In Tifset, they spent several hours going through the paper archives—raw data, unscanned and unprocessed. It was slow, dreary work. Arekhon possessed only a basic reading knowledge of Immeringic, and Maraganha’s trick with the eiran didn’t work on the written language. They ended up dividing the job accordingly, so that he read, painstakingly, all the reports and files and ledgers, while she talked to the clerks and secretaries. Their efforts paid off, eventually, in the tax records for Gifla Harbor, a small fishing port at the isolate southern end of the archipelago. One Narin Iyal, a resident alien with birthplace self-listed as “Amisket in Veredde,” had dutifully reported and paid last year’s taxes on money earned as a crew member aboard the deep-sea fishing boat Ninefold Star.
