Doma Reel stood at the center of the railway platform beneath the bright glare of the two hundred white animal fat lanterns, her heavy copper soup ladle held in her right hand like a judge’s mace, her canvas apron white with barley flour and dried lard. Around the long zinc table sat sixty delegates. Men and women who had spent twelve years trading curses, forged coal vouchers, and bitter accusations across the barricades of the seven wards.
The air in the shed had grown thick with the smell of wet wool, bitter tobacco smoke, and the cold draft rising from the drainage drain pits. For two hours, they had hammered out the technical allocations: the quarry limestone sink, the salt-glass baffles, the river overflow gates, the gatehouse cutting torches, and the defense of the ridge narrow high walkways. Every building risk had been faced, measured, and assigned to living hands. The clockwork framework was complete. But beneath the blueprints lay a festering wound that had poisoned Rookvale since the first winter of the emergency decree.
Ten yards to the east of the table, behind a heavy oak door barred with a four-inch timber beam, sat Magistrate Halden Pell. Through the narrow iron check wicket, one could hear the faint, rhythmic scraping of the judge’s polished boots against the cold stone floor. It was followed by the wet, choking gasp of a man trying to suppress his weeping.
