Tomas Reed reached to the very bottom of Crag’s brass-bound courier satchel. He pulled out the third and final bundle of documents. A thick packet of parchment folios stamped with the royal blue wax seal of the Provincial High Treasury.
These were the quarterly warrants for The Deep Gallery Emergency Extraction Bond. The original 1,800-crown locked deposit deposited by the Crown sixteen years ago to finance the rescue of Dennis Cole and the eighty trapped stonecutters.
Tomas laid the vouchers side by side across the rough bench. “Look at the office draws, Nessa.”
Nessa leaned over the parchment, her land-mapper’s magnifying lens in hand. “Every three months, Chief Administrator Krend filed a sworn paper with the Country Circuit Bench in Bellwether. ‘Quarterly Report on Deep Gallery Digging: Drainage operations continuing. Exploratory drifts advancing. Timber wooden props kept.’ And attached to every report is a payout voucher for thirty silver crowns, drawn directly from the locked deposit account for ‘office oversight and safety building.’”
“One hundred and twenty silver crowns a year,” Tomas said, his voice flat as an iron anvil. “For sixteen years. That’s one thousand nine hundred and twenty crowns drawn out of country relief funds. They took the Crown’s gold to rescue the men, while keeping the iron drop-gate locked with three padlocks to make sure no living soul ever discovered the corpses.”
