Stringent

The social norms of bribery

📗 The following story stands alone and can be read without any knowledge of my prior works, but does involve story elements that appeared previously in Barnacles, in which a young agonarch defies the ghost of his grandfather to implement a new taxation scheme aimed at saving his land from losing all its mages. 

The first thing I learned smuggling was: don’t ask questions.

It worked great until I wound up in front of the continent’s most stringent taxmen, mouth gaping like a fish while they gutted a pregnant spidersow right in the middle of my cargo hold.

Now I make sure to get enough bribe money up front.

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Afterword

I've been on a real kick lately researching and writing about taxes and tax collectors, but according to my notes Stringent is actually the first story involving the yhaolingi, creatures I developed back in 2020 during the spidersilk edition of this newsletter. I was pretty surprised by this actually; they play a fairly crucial role in several ongoing "primordial" storylines, and are a lot of fun.

We'll discuss them more during the Friday Flash edition next month, but for now, I want to talk about bribery.