"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."Thomas Kane is no longer the young archivist who first uncovered the Factory Ledgers. He is a man who has seen the machinery of the state at its most cruel-and its most sophisticated.In The Merchant's Debt, Kane is drawn into the shadows of 19th-century commercial law. When a desperate merchant seeks his help, Kane uncovers a predatory debt network that uses "freedom of contract" as a tool of systematic ruin. It is a world where the desperate find their futures dissolving in a language they cannot speak, and where the drafters of the contracts collect their fees from the wreckage of broken lives.Following a trail of coordinated extraction mechanisms across multiple municipalities, Kane must map a network that connects high-finance boardrooms to the smallest shops in the coal district. In a series of high-stakes magistrate hearings, Kane attempts to prove that a contract can be as deadly a weapon as a surgeon's scalpel or a policeman's truncheon.In this ninth volume of the Thomas Kane Investigations, the Archive faces its most complex adversary yet: an invisible monster that hides behind the "majestic complexity" of the law. The work is perpetual, the machinery is adapting, but the record remains the only shield for the forgotten.The Merchant's Debt is a gripping, intellectual Victorian noir that exposes the dark heart of commercial exploitation and the enduring fight for institutional accountability.