“And the third measurement?” Len asked, looking across the table at Bram Ash, who was unbuckling the wet leather straps of his town breastplate. “The registry on High Street.”
Bram lifted the heavy iron breastplate off his chest. He set it on the floor with a hollow clang that rattled the flat stone slabs. Beneath the armor, his wool uniform tunic was dark with sweat across the shoulder blades. It smelled of damp wool, coal soot, and cheap pipe tobacco. He rubbed the raw red chafe marks on his collarbone with his thick fingers, his bruised eyebrow twitching in the green lantern light as he rolled his stiff shoulders to ease the cramp in his neck.
“The town archives are located in the basement of the Old Grammar School on High Street,” Bram said. He pulled a dry rag from his coat to wipe the river slime from his hardwood truncheon. “Before the black sky fell twelve years ago, it was the central academy for country land-mappers, mapmakers, and high-pressure clerks. When Chancellor Morn dissolved the civic council and militarized the wards, he seized the school, fortified the outer edge with iron palisades, and converted the underground library vaults into the central storehouse for country vital statistics and claimant ledgers.”
