While Kallias traveled the road to Canosa with his assistant xenoparakletor and the painted blue stone worn around his neck that he decided was the badge of his office, the master of the mint was dispatched on Sideros' recommendation and the assent of Herodion to investigate the temple debt and find out what was really happening. Although at first frustrated, Pydamon later described Ianedar, the master of the mint, as "indubitably skilled in his craft", and "kind as a woman to her child" in helping him. Despite that...peculiar praise, however, Ianedar was really quite thorough, and was able to find that some accounting had been left out. Speaking around, and with the assistance of his now adopted father Timaeus (who had been the first to help him get his position), Ianedar discovered a quite complicated plot laid by several of the seers that went far deeper than previously thought. As it turns out the previous head seer leaving the city with a huge amount of silver and gold from donations to the temple was no one-time occurrence, and in fact there appeared to be some kind of funnel of money going out of the city that also tied several businesses whose absentee owners were nowhere to be found and with further investigation did not exist.
A complex network of informants and contacts to someone outside the city had been sending money from private businesses and temple donations outside of the city entirely, to where it was uncertain. Over thirty people were tried and exiled by a jury. The only lead was that all of the exilees apparently fled immediately to the city of Lykai, according to the information of an Eretrian merchant who saw their ship stop in Hydrus and came back to the city to report the incident. Over the course of several weeks, Ianedar and Timaeus uncovered further ties to Lykai, including a fisherman's boat that was constantly docked in harbor with no one taking it out to fish. Breaking into the boat, they found a horde of tablets recording debts, this one with clay tokens stamped in the Enetoi language.
At this point Timaeus made an excited gasp and muttered something under his breath. "Throw him to the crows!" He cried out to one in particular as he ran to the Boule. After a discussion with Herodion, a special assembly was called of the ekklesia and Herodion relayed the information that they had uncovered. It was quite likely that this whole business, including funneling private funds out of Eretria to Lykai, had to do with Leontios. An equal amount of citizens cursed the heavens in rage and expressed confusion about who precisely "Leontios" was.
Leontios was the kind of citizen that if he was in legend would have been charitably compared to the Goddess Eros; perhaps he would have been her son. In the city's early years he was a business partner of Timaeus, but his increasingly frantic antics, such as cutting the heads off barbaroi and throwing them at the enemy, creating gangs of fishermen to beat up other gangs of fishermen and push out competitors, and causing a revolution in Epidamnos through his extremely exploitative moneylending practices, all caused him to eventually chase opportunities at the head of the Adriatic among the Enetoi, a trading and naval people living among the lagoons and flat plains of the area. It was presumed that he was dead, and indeed that was the news, but he had apparently somehow survived and wherever he was had some connection to Lykai. Unfortunately, with Kallias going to the north, the investigation had to conclude merely by tearing down the network he had somehow constructed despite not being spotted in the city for years.
The comical ridiculousness of the investigation highlighted the basic problems of the city's "fast" court system that would convene in the morning, convict in the afternoon, and exile in the evening. Many of these people had been brought up on irregularities, but were able to use specific appeals to one God or another, or good rhetoric, or an interesting story, to convince the jury that the irregularities were nothing of the sort and that there was no concern to be had. Although the city did not lose any money (indeed, if this scheme had attempted to attack the city's finances it would have been caught much sooner), it was a disaster for some citizens and the temples. Business partners and lenders had been essentially robbed blind by this shadowy network, and there was no assurance everyone had been caught. Timaeus explained that Leontios planned on the spot, but his plans would always have "plans within plans", that would take time to come to fruition; the trouble tended to be that all his plans within plans collided against each other and produced a catastrophe. If he had gotten better and was even avoiding detection, then this was far more serious than previously thought.
