Sweet MYTH-tery of Life by Robert Asprin

“That’s good!” he exclaimed. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

I glanced at Aahz.

“Accountant humor, I guess,” he said with a grimace. “Incomprehensible to mere mortals. You know, like ‘We’ll make it up on volume’ jokes?”

“Now that’s not funny,” Grimble corrected with mock severity. “We’ve had that line dumped on us all too often … in complete sincerity. Right Bunny?”

I couldn’t help but notice that he was now treating Bunny with the deference of a colleague. Apparently her joke, however nonsensical it had been to me, had convinced the Chancellor that she was more than my arm ornament.

“Too true,” my assistant said. “But seriously, Grimble, getting back to the problem at hand, we’re going to need complete, non-camouflaged figures if we’re going to get the kingdom’s finances back on course. I know the tradition is to pretty things up with charts and studies of historic trends, but since we’ll be working with insiders only, just this once let’s try it with hard, cold data.”

It sounded like a reasonable request to me, but the Chancellor seemed to think it was a radical proposal . . . and not a particularly wise one, at that.

“I don’t know, Bunny,” he said, shooting a look at Aahz and me one normally reserves for spies and traitors. “I mean, you know how it is. Even though we usually get cast as the villains of bureaucracy, we don’t have any real power to implement change. All we do is make recommendations to those who can change things. If we don’t sugarcoat our recommendations, or slant them so they’re in line with what the movers and shakers wanted to hear all along, or clutter them up until the Gods themselves can’t understand what we’re really saying, then there’s a risk that we end up being what gets changed.”