The former baggage forwarding office beneath the raised tram platform had been transformed into a working drafting room.
Across three frame stand tables pushed end-to-end lay the four-fold linen blueprint of the country sky shield, weighted at the margins with heavy iron track-nuts, brass measuring tongs. An empty zinc ammunition can. The room smelled of wet wool coats, bitter chicory dregs, sulfuric coal gas from the overhead locomotives. The sharp, bitter-salt tang of powdered vine charcoal.
Ivara Quill stood at the head of the center table, her single right hand wielding a sharpened stick of willow charcoal with rapid, decisive strokes. Her left sleeve, neatly pinned to her leather land-mapper’s coat with an iron needle-point arrow, was motionless against her ribs as she sketched the high-pressure linkages between the Tier Four drainage bypasses and the central Star tower release valve.
Around the table stood the core of the country coalition: Geth Marr. His sixteen-pound sledge leaned against his knee. Bram Ash, his court guard stave barred across the back of an oak chair. Len Vey, his uninjured right hand resting flat against Cira’s sealed parcel. And Melli Dorn, the forewoman of the Salt Ward glassworks.
Melli was forty-two years old, broad-chested as a blacksmith, her bare forearms covered in pale, circular splash-scars from twenty winters of dipping molten soda-lime glass into cooling troughs. Her thick, dark hair was tied back with a leather thong, her heavy leather apron scorched black across the belly from standing before the reverberatory lehrs.
