It was not merely counting the official number of women, men and children, or amount of land and goods, but the act of compiling the information too, surveying, interviewing, and presenting it in a way that the queen would find beneficial for her to make informed choices about the direction she wished to take Koton. There would be no end of liars and cheats seeing this as an exercise in tax collecting, or simply boasting, not to mention trying to make sense of the numbers of people migrating back and forth across borders like air through an open mouth. No doubt there would be many interfering, so that the census did not highlight any untoward business within the nation. There were thousands of people who lived in tribes across Vispasia, too, and who claimed no nation as their own. The Sun Chamber always approved of official efforts to monitor a country like this. It went some way to analysing the large and fluid cultures of the Vispasian Royal Union so that strategies could be formed when the kings and queens met in Free State.
What do You think about Retribution (Drakenfeld 2)?
