Chapter 352 --352
She went through the roster herself. She looked for three things: competence, which was visible in the quality of their previous audit reports; independence, which was visible in whether their career advancement had followed normal merit patterns or had included the specific irregular jumps that indicated patronage; and nerve, which was harder to assess from paperwork but which she could sometimes read in the way a person had documented uncomfortable findings in past audits — whether they had softened them, buried them in qualifications, or written them plainly.
She found four people who had all three.
She called them in and spoke to them directly, which was also not standard procedure, and she explained exactly what they were going to find in the Verdan corridor garrison and exactly what she needed documented and exactly what the chain of reporting they were following led to and why that chain needed to be followed all the way to its end regardless of where the end was.
They listened. They asked two good questions, which told her she had chosen correctly.
They left.
She returned to her desk.
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The carriage reached the training post on the third day after Tarven.
She had sent ahead — a single message, brief, delivered by shadow courier rather than standard post, which arrived at the training post approximately twelve hours before she did and contained no details beyond the fact of her coming and the instruction that she wanted no ceremony prepared. She wanted to see the post as it was on an ordinary day, not as it arranged itself to look on a day when the Empress was coming, because those were two different places and she was only interested in one of them.
The training post for the beast knight program was situated at the edge of the Verdan region’s eastern plateau — high ground, which she understood immediately as a practical choice when the carriage climbed the final road and the view opened up. From up here you could see a significant portion of the corridor. You could see the forest. You could see the road they had come from, the distant suggestion of the capital’s direction, the shape of the terrain that defined the eastern approaches to the empire’s heartland.