Fire Sale of Fiefdoms

The Council naturally understood all this, but the problem was that it had no money!

This did not mean Amn's treasury was truly empty. Rather, this year's budget was already running a deficit, and the coming pensions and funds were entirely unplanned expenditures. It was only midyear, yet all of the Council's spending had been finalized before the new year. This enormous expense could no longer be covered by the originally allocated funds, because doing so would wreck the Council's entire annual budget.

Amn's Council was not merely decorative. It wielded real power. Even though the true core of the Council was the Council of Six, that did not change the fact. It was precisely because the Council controlled Amn's financial budget that it could govern this conflict-ridden nation. Without money, who would listen to them?

But precisely because of that, they could not cut the budget—at least, they could not cut most of it. Once the budget ran into trouble, Amn's already fragile political situation would certainly be thrown into turmoil. That was the last thing the Council wanted to see. So the budget could not be cut. Worse still, they could not touch the money in the treasury either, because that was next year's budget, perhaps even the budget for the year after.

Amn's current situation was far from good. The decline of maritime trade had drastically reduced its coastal revenues, which meant its financial state would remain dreadful for the next two years, perhaps even three or four. After all, maritime trade could not recover overnight; it needed time. And during that process, the Council would have to keep pouring funds into reconstruction, or else they could just wait to starve.

This was also a flaw in Amn's political system. Its republic and aristocracy coexisted, leaving the