By midnight, the registrar’s office was covered in dozens of historical manifests, cross-referenced across twenty years of town records.
Tomas Reed sat beneath the green-shaded reading lamp, his cart driver’s magnifying glass moving step by step along the faded columns of Ordnance Voucher Number 882. The document had been pulled from the sealed archives of the Royal Arsenal at Bellwether by Hester Quill’s clerks, approved under the Great Seal of the Keeper of Public Writs.
Beside Tomas, Nessa Vale was conducting the chemical ink assay on the twenty-year-old bounty receipt that had released five thousand gold crowns from the country treasury into the Dragon-Slayers’ private accounts.
“Look at the erasure under the date line, Tomas,” Nessa said, her voice quiet in the night silence of the museum.
She held a said clearlyglass pipette two inches above the thick parchment, depositing a tiny drop of potassium ferrocyanide solution onto the edge of the date seal. The chemical test chemical reacted instantly with the leftover iron salts in the parchment fibers. That turned bright Prussian blue wherever dark oak-ink had been scraped away with a steel eraser knife.
“The original supply order date was August twelfth,” Nessa showed, pointing with her needle. “Three weeks before the supposed dragon attack in the Great Siphon. The word ‘Border Defense’ was written in standard carbon ink. Then, two months later, someone scraped away the original pass-key code and wrote ‘Emergency Dragon Eradication’ in dark oak-ink made from oak galls and copperas.”
