Chapter 303 --303
The generosity was the problem.
Not the generosity itself — rulers were generous when they wanted something, and wanting something was not a crime. The problem was the specific shape of it. The treasury queue position had moved from thirty-seven to two within six hours of her conversation with the administrative director’s contact. The bank instrument integration had been formally expedited with a seal that required authorization from above the treasury office’s standard operating level.
Someone above the treasury office had noticed her instrument.
She had not told anyone above the treasury office about it.
She sat with this at the fourth bell, the household asleep around her, the working list in her hands.
’Why,’ she wrote in the margin.
Underlined it.
’’’
She started digging the next morning.
Not openly. Not in the way that produced results quickly but left traces. The kind of digging that Dimitri did at his best — the slow methodical kind that moved through secondary records and tertiary records and the specific archaeology of what had been filed adjacent to the thing you were looking for rather than the thing itself.
She gave Dimitri three questions and did not tell him why she was asking.
He did not ask why.