Chapter 7: Into the Records

She got into the administrative wing on the fourteenth day, through the locked door at the end of the corridor behind the Hall of Petitions.

The lock was a standard imperial mechanism — she had spent four days confirming this through careful observation of the corridor, watching who used the door and what they did when they approached it. The answer was: three separate senior clerks, all from Sethe's administration, using the same key design. She had borrowed a wax impression kit from a locksmith she had found in the lower city during her one afternoon of approved excursion, and she had pressed the key impression from the wax the hall steward used to seal Lady Fenn's correspondence, which was a copy of the same treasury-issue administrative key — a standard, rarely changed key that opened approximately forty doors in this palace, which was a security failure that she suspected Sethe knew about and tolerated because it made his own clerks' movement easier.

Sethe's entire operation was like this: efficient at the edges, sloppy at the center, sustained by the assumption that no one unauthorized would ever have a reason to enter, and that if they did they would not know what they were looking at.

She entered at the third hour of the night, when Lady Fenn was asleep and the Fallow Wing was quiet. She wore gray, darker than her usual gray, and she moved through the service passage to the Hall of Petitions corridor and then through the door with the borrowed key and into the administrative wing.

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She had prepared a list of what she was looking for, in order of priority.

First: the file access logs for the Solen family records. Dorn had asked about them at the banquet. She needed to know what he already knew.

Second: any documentation of the tribute transactions from the eastern ashcraft mining region for the five years prior to her family's execution. The mines had been the reason — she was almost certain they had been the reason — and the money had to have moved through treasury records somewhere.

Third, which she had added to her list only three days ago: documentation of a payment made approximately five years ago for what Dorn's aide had called a document naming her family. She had heard this phrase once, in a hallway, overheard not eavesdropped, and she had turned it over in her mind for days. Not a document accusing her family. A document naming them. The phrasing was specific, and the specificity suggested the document was more particular than a denunciation — something that identified them as targets for a deliberate reason.

She found the file access logs in the second room off the main corridor, in a cabinet she had located through the accounting of where documents in the reading rooms had been retrieved from and returned to. The logs were organized by Registry section, which meant she found the Solen records entry by working from the eastern family section backward to the correct cabinet.

The log for the Solen family file had three entries in the past two years.

The first was eighteen months ago: a routine audit access by a Registry clerk whose name she did not recognize. Standard. Expected.

The second was nine months ago: access by a senior clerk from treasury. No reason given, but treasury clerks accessed Registry files when there were ongoing financial questions related to a family's holdings. The Solen mines had been absorbed into imperial holdings; a treasury clerk reviewing the transition documentation would be normal.

The third was four months ago.

She had to read the name twice.

The access had been logged under the seal of Councillor Vael's administrative office.

Not a clerk. Not a proxy. The office seal itself, which was used when the Councillor or one of her direct senior agents had made the request.

Mira stood in the quiet of the administrative corridor, the access log in her hands, and breathed through the weight of what this meant.

Vael had pulled her family's files four months ago. Cassian Vael had appeared in her peripheral vision every day for the past eight. These were connected; they had to be. Which meant the woman who was his mother, who was one of the four people who had signed the order that burned her house, had accessed her family's records and found something that interested her — and then, four months later, Cassian had begun watching Lady Fenn's unremarkable handmaid.

She had come to court expecting to be the one doing the finding.

She replaced the access log and continued.

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The tribute records were in the treasury section, which was more heavily organized and therefore easier to navigate once you knew what you were looking for. She had a rough accounting in her memory of what House Solen's tribute payments should have looked like: a noble house of their size in the eastern mining region would have paid a percentage of mine output to the imperial treasury quarterly, with adjustments for market fluctuation, reported through the regional governor's office and verified by treasury inspectors.

She found the records going back seven years with relative ease. The first two years were unremarkable — the numbers were what they should have been, the verification seals were all present, the inspector signatures were legible. She cross-referenced against her mental model and found no discrepancy.

Then, three years before the burning, the numbers changed.

Not dramatically. The change was subtle enough that she had to read the pages three times to be certain she was seeing it: the output figures reported by House Solen's estate manager were consistent year over year, but the amounts received by the treasury were approximately twelve percent lower than the reported output should have produced. The discrepancy appeared every quarter. It was built into the records as though it had always been there, as though the twelve percent had simply disappeared between the estate manager's report and the treasury's ledger.

Twelve percent quarterly for three years.

She did not need to calculate what that represented. Her father had overseen those mines personally. She had grown up watching him do accounting at the estate table, and she had learned numbers the way she had learned to read — as a practical skill, as a tool for understanding the world. She knew what twelve percent of her family's quarterly output amounted to.

It was substantial. It was more than substantial. It was the kind of figure that, if it had actually been skimmed rather than lost to an accounting error, represented a sustained and deliberate theft from the imperial treasury — which would have been a crime serious enough to warrant exactly the kind of response the Councillors had deployed.

Except.

She looked at the inspector verification seals on the low-output records.

They were Sethe's seals. All of them. The treasury inspectors who had verified the discrepancy — three years of quarterly inspections, twelve documents — all bore the mark of Sethe's administrative office.

In the years before the discrepancy, the verification seals rotated among three different treasury offices. That was normal. That was the system working as designed, with multiple offices checking each other's work.

Starting in the year the discrepancy appeared, only one office. Only Sethe's.

She stood in the quiet room and understood what she was looking at.

The twelve percent had not been skimmed by House Solen. The twelve percent had been skimmed by Sethe, or on Sethe's behalf, using his office's control of the verification process to ensure that the discrepancy was attributed to the reporting entity rather than the verifying entity. And when, presumably, the risk of the scheme's discovery had grown large enough, or when the mines had become desirable enough in their own right, the scheme had needed a conclusion. A way to end it before it unraveled.

A document naming her family.

She set the records back in their exact order.