Rensyn frowned for a moment and seemed to think about the question. “I remember worrying about it for at least a week before Aymini assigned Sophia and Dav to me, but I can’t remember who mentioned it first. It was always the same. There were people missing in western Casterville, but no one knew how many, who, or when. It was all too similar, but there was no request to look into it.”
Rensyn shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know what to do about it until I tried to put the two new people with the Quinns and added Miss Hunter. I expected it to be a long walk where they could talk and figure out how to work together. Even if there were corpsevines, five Called is more than enough to go to the Conservatory and look around safely, as long as they stay together. I just wanted to be reassured that there weren’t corpsevines. I didn’t expect them to find any.”
Sophia was pretty sure that wasn’t what Master Jessamine wanted to hear, but if that was the case she hid it well.
The Registry Master nodded encouragingly. “Why didn’t you bring the rumors to me so that I could put up a request to look into it?”
Rensyn looked up at her, clearly startled. “Matt said you knew and couldn’t, wouldn’t, do anything until you had more than rumors. So I had to figure it out myself.”
Sophia blinked at Rensyn. Did he really not realize that he’d just thrown his friend under the bus? Even she could tell that Master Jessamine’s question implied she didn’t know and therefore Rensyn’s answer meant Matt deliberately stopped Rensyn from telling her. She snuck a glance at the Mage-Chancellor. His expression didn’t reveal much, but she doubted he missed the implications either.
This had to be a show where he was the intended audience, but just as clearly it was a show where the Registry Master hadn’t had the chance to prepare the other actors. That was clearly the point.
“He came to you with the rumors?” The Registry Master pushed a little more.
Rensyn shook his head. He still didn’t seem to have caught on to what was going on. “No, I went to him. He always knows what the best way to proceed is. He’s a Commander, after all.”
The Registry Master nodded. Sophia expected her to ask the Commander why he said what he did, but she turned to the snake-man instead. “Johan, you came to me with a concern a couple of months ago. Please tell everyone here what it was.”
The snake-man lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “Someone’s been stealing from us, both items and gold. I haven’t been able to figure out who or how, no matter how I look into it. It’s not just the Registry, either; the Casterville supplies are also being pilfered. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s being taken; all we’ve managed to figure out is that what we take in doesn’t match what’s being spent plus what we have left. Whoever it is, they aren’t tripping any of the alarms we’ve set up or alerting any of the guards, even the new ones.”
“How much has been stolen?” The Mage-Chancellor leaned forward, clearly very interested now. “I knew there was a problem, but is it more than a few dozen crowns?”
“Over five thousand crowns’ worth,” Johan’s words clearly surprised the Mage-Chancellor. “From the Registry. Half that, roughly, from Casterville. Worse, it’s not coming back; there are no signs of someone spending too much or selling items they shouldn’t have. We have no idea where it went. It just evaporated.”
“How could a thief get away with that much?” The Mage-Chancellor sounded astonished. “We don’t keep that much in one place!”
“It wasn’t a thief,” Dav’s words drew everyone’s attention. He waved towards Johan. “You … I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. You said you couldn’t catch anyone sneaking in or with things they shouldn’t have, right? That probably means it was someone who was supposed to be there, if the missing wealth ever existed in the first place.”
“What do you mean, if it ever existed?” Johan sounded offended. “Money doesn’t just disappear.”
“It does if it’s just marks on paper,” Dav countered. “Now, I can’t say that’s what happened; I don’t know what happened. But you either have someone embezzling or you have someone faking your numbers. Maybe both.”
Sophia tried to hide her smile at Dav saying what happened right after he said he wasn’t doing that.
“That would explain why your numbers don’t add up, too,” Dav added. “All you have to do is miss one place when you’re faking numbers and it doesn’t work. You said you think a lot is missing; what if that was the point? What if whoever’s doing this wanted to make you think you were wealthier than you really were?” He paused, then chuckled softly. “It’d be a good way to hide a smaller theft, too.”
Sophia wondered exactly how Dav knew that was possible. Was it something he’d done, or was it just something he’d seen in a show somewhere? There was a massive difference but either one could explain what he’d said.
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“Whatever the reason is, you’ve reached the same conclusion I did.” The Registry Master’s voice was cold and sharp. “Someone we trust is behind it, someone with access to both the Registry and Casterville vaults. Or, I suppose, records; you could be correct about that. It expands the number of people who could be responsible slightly, but there still aren’t many and most are in this room. We don’t know who it was or I’d have done something already, so let’s go back to the matter of the corpsevines. Commander Walsh, you were the one who identified the arm. Were you certain of your observation?”
The redhead in the phoenix robe nodded confidently. He seemed a little amused rather than shocked, but Sophia knew that wasn’t proof of anything. “Yes, it was definitely infested, as I told you.”
The Registry Master nodded. “And Samuel, you burnt it, correct?”
The foxkin was still slumped in his seat, but he no longer sounded like he was sulking. Instead, he sounded like he was trying to suppress his interest in the happenings around him. “Yes, Rensyn insisted it needed to be burnt. Given his past, well, I didn’t question it.”
Once again, the Registry Master simply nodded in response. “They brought one other thing out of the West Conservatory on that trip. Halven, I believe you were the one who examined the broken magic stone?”
Halven nodded. The smile on his face seemed almost sinister for a moment, but Sophia brushed the idea away. She was surely imagining things. “Yes, they brought me a natural magic stone that was broken shortly before the corpsevine resurgence was announced. It was broken a long time ago, so the magic had diminished enough that the shards were little more than an enrichment agent for plants.”
“Can you tell how long it was broken before they brought it in? Was it broken before the first fight against the corpsevines?” Master Jessamine’s voice softened a little. It was still clear, but there was no longer a sharp edge to her words.
Halven nodded confidently. “That was ten years ago, so yes, definitely. It was broken at least that long ago, maybe twice as long. The shards were fairly weak; it should have been broken into usable fragments several years before they brought it to me.”
Jessamine’s expression shifted into a smile. She was clearly happy with his answer. “Can you tell how long another one has been broken?”
Halven nodded. “Approximately, yes.”
The Registry Master turned to look at Sophia. “The stones you picked up in the Leveled Challenge; bring them out. All of them.”
Sophia blinked in surprise. She hadn’t realized Master Jessamine cared that much about that part of the story. She’d seemed more focused on the phoenix pin.
Sophia shrugged to herself. She might not understand the plan, but there was certainly no reason not to do as the Registry Master asked. They hadn’t really talked about it yet, but Sophia expected that they’d sell the rocks; none of them had a use for them any more than they’d had for the first one. She pulled one out, then paused; where should she put them?
Movement caught her eye and she saw Halven gesture to a spot near his seat. That made sense; he was going to look at them, after all. They made a nice pile when she laid them all out together.
“This is the group that fully completed the Leveled Challenge, then?” The Mage-Chancellor’s voice was smooth, as if the news of someone stealing large amounts from him was already forgotten. Sophia doubted that was truly the case; he was probably just keeping up appearances.
“Yes.” There was actual warmth in the Registry Master’s voice. “They’re a promising group. They set out to figure out how to actually solve a Challenge instead of just killing everything. From what they’ve said, it really wasn’t that hard, if you knew about the geodes.”
Her voice turned a little rueful but stayed warm and approachable. “It should have been fairly easy even without that knowledge, now that I know what they found. I missed the clues; it didn’t even occur to me to wonder why half of the building was dead while the other half had living plants. That was before the Challenge was created, of course, but it’s still something I should have considered.”
Sophia grinned as she set out the last few separated crystals. That was confirmation that what they’d solved wasn’t entirely a situation set up by the Guide; instead, it was based on the real situation. She’d already assumed that was the case, because of the pin, but it meant that the geodes they’d pulled out of the Challenge were probably also from reality and not false duplicates.
Unlike the monsters. At least their actions meant there shouldn’t be more corpsevines created; that was the important thing.
When Sophia picked up her pack after placing the last piece of stone, she found that Halven was already examining one of the rocks. He had something in his hand that looked like a jeweler’s loupe to Sophia, but it was easy to tell it was enchanted. She couldn’t tell what the enchantment was without a closer look, and that didn’t seem polite, so she simply watched.
“A year,” was Halven’s verdict. His voice was steady, but it was the voice of a doctor delivering a bad diagnosis rather than an enchanter exploring an enchantment. “Roughly, at least. No longer than a year and a half, could be as little as three months if it was in a highly draining environment. It will take me a while to go through all of them, but based on the general magical level I’m seeing, none of them predate the first corpsevine attack when the West Conservatory was abandoned. If these were found inside the West Conservatory, someone placed them there after it was abandoned.”
That was the first time anyone openly stated the truth the Registry Master was working up to, but as Sophia looked around she saw that the only person who seemed surprised was Mentor Rensyn. Everyone else had either already figured it out or had good control of their expression.
“Thank you,” Master Jessamine said into the sudden silence. “That was the last piece of confirmation I needed. The geodes weren’t the only thing found there; there was also a brooch. The brooch I gave back to Commander Walsh at the beginning of this meeting. Tell me, Matt, why? Why did you bring the corpsevines back?” Her voice seemed to break a little at the end of her question.