Free Exploits by Mike Resnick Page A

absolutely nothing about him.”
    “Then how do you figure that he's not in the market for a preacher?”
    “The mere fact that I haven't heard of him means that no one who has had any dealings with him has lived long enough to pass on that information to us.” He shrugged. “Still, I suppose it's in our best interest to seek him out.”
    “It is?” I asked, since he had just loaded me down with a mighty tall heap of misgivings.
    He nodded. “I'm already out of money, and I'll be out of rice wine in another few days. Possibly I can hire on as an advisor.”
    “What kind of combat do you specialize in, Brother Merriweather?” I asked.
    “Combat?” he repeated. “Do you think I joined the army to fight ? I'm an accountant.”
    “An accountant?”
    “ Some body has to pay for the uniforms and weapons and bullets and transportation and consumables,” he replied. “I mean, Empire is all very well and good, Reverend Jones, but only if it can remain cost effective.”
    “And you figure this here General Ling Sen is in serious need of an accountant?” I asked him.
    “He's got an army to run, hasn't he?” answered Merriweather. “Why, with the things I could teach him about double-entry bookkeeping alone, he could continue to devastate the countryside for an extra three or four months at no additional cost.”
    Well, we kept on walking and drinking from Merriweather's diminishing supply of rice wine, and he kept trying to explain the more esoteric principles of tax-loss carry-forwards to me, and one day kind of melted into another, until one morning about a month later we came smack-dab up against this great big wall and couldn't go no farther.
    “Looks like General Ling Sen don't take kindly to visitors,” I opined as I looked both right and left and couldn't see the end of the wall nowhere in sight.
    “With a wall like this around his barracks, one might say that he seems absolutely hostile to them,” agreed Merriweather.
    “Still,” I said, “a man who can build a wall this big probably ain't exactly destitute.”
    “True,” added Merriweather. “In fact, he's probably more in need of an accountant than most.”
    “And if this here wall is half as long as it looks to be, I got a feeling General Ling Sen ought to be happy to pay for a little heavenly insurance to make sure it don't get wiped out by earthquakes or floods or other such disasters as God is inclined to bring to them who don't toss a few coins into the poorbox every now and then.”
    “I do believe we're in business, Reverend Jones,” said Merriweather.
    Just then I heard some feet shuffling, which one hardly ever tends to hear when standing on grass like we was, so I looked up and, sure enough, there were three Chinese soldiers looking down on us from atop the wall.
    “What are you doing here?” asked one of them in Chinese.
    “Just looking for General Ling Sen's headquarters,” I answered.
    “Why?”
    “We've come all the way from across the sea to bring him spiritual and fiduciary comfort,” I said. “If you guys work for him, why don't you run off and tell him his lucky day has arrived?”
    The three of them conferred for a long minute, and then one ran off along the top of the wall and the other two trained their rifles on us.
    “Do not move,” said one of them. “We must decide what to do with you.”
    A minute later a door opened about fifty feet away, and the soldier who had run off stepped out of the wall and motioned us to come to him. When we got there, we found ourselves facing half a dozen armed soldiers, who escorted us up this winding staircase, and after we climbed up maybe fifty feet or so, we stepped out through another door onto the top of the wall, which was a lot broader than it looked from the ground.
    I heard a motor off to my left, and when I turned I saw a brand-new Bentley sedan driving right toward us. I was still wondering how they managed to get it onto the wall in the first place when it came to a