At the first stroke of the morning market bell on the sixteenth day, the fog rising off the central canal of Oran was already burning away into a clear, bright autumn sky. Before the iron-barred archway of the Independent Witness House on Guildhall Square, the stone steps were washed clean by the night rain, and two senior town notaries in black wool gowns stood behind the long granite counter where the chained civic ledgers rested on brass lecterns.
Unlike the Aperture Court’s registry in the North Ward the Independent Witness House had been established eighty years ago by joint compact of the river-barge guilds, the coopers, the ironmongers, and the city aldermen. It answered solely to the chartered training halls and Senior Steward Osen Tal’s clerk hall. Any contract, debt-note, or evidentiary sworn paper entered into its chained iron-bound books and stamped by three guild witnesses became public town record. Not even a sect steward could tear a leaf from those chains without shutting down every wharf crane on the river.
When Seyun, Ilyra, and Mina climbed the wide granite steps just after sunrise, Daro Kesh was already waiting for them beside the left-hand stone pillar.
The forty-two-year-old swordmaster wore a clean, unpatched coat of dark grey homespun with his iron-mounted sword scabbarded at his hip, and behind him stood two grizzled master coopers from yesterday’s gallery at the Old Wrestling Lodge. Men who held guild-notary tokens on their belts and had volunteered at dawn to serve as the civic…
