The tram platform smelled of clean spruce sawdust, cold lime wash, and very thirsty grain hauled up from the dry cellars of Track Three. On the forty-foot assembly table—built of five heavy railway stringers laid across zinc-sheeted frame stands—the working documents were arrayed beneath four brass-framed reading glasses. The yellowed, brittle leaves of Deren Vey’s quarantine letter lay beside the approved military casualty gazettes Cira had smuggled through the northern boundary canopy. Next to them rested Melli Dorn’s heat swelling charts for heat-softened salt-glass and the three-foot sheepskin thick parchment of the Rookvale Recovery Promise, engrossed in black iron drafting ink by Urel’s steady right hand.
There was no speaker’s rostrum, no velvet drape, and no judge’s canopy. Sixty men and women sat on overturned nail kegs, grease tubs, and battered freight benches. Their wool coats were patched at the elbows with sailcloth. Their knuckles were scarred with acid wash, lye burns, and black-powder scoring. These were not town councilmen or court attorneys in beaver-fur cloaks. They were the running core of the seven wards. They were the boiler tenders who shoveled rotten-egg hard coal into the lower chimney pipes, the glass-cutters who balanced molten pots on hand-trucks, the river mechanics who cleared drowned drift from the intake weirs. The orchard growers who spent their winters brushing white light-mold from stunted apple boughs.
