Examiner Corvin Hest marched down the wet cobblestones of Fish Street with the stiff, offended stance of a man who believed the world had been created primarily to waste his time. His heavy summoner’s robes of violet wool were hitched up above his calf-high boots to keep them out of the mud. Even so, several spots of black harbor grease had already splattered his hem.
Behind him walked two town wardens carrying brass-tipped staves and an iron-strapped relic cage. It was followed at a slower, more deliberate pace by Senior Auditor Varo Nenn of the Lathmere Board of Works. Nenn was a thin, dry man of fifty with ink-stained cuffs. He carried a leather-bound folio beneath his wool cloak and a pair of brass glasses perched on his narrow nose.
The heavy air smelled of salt mud, flaking pipe lime, and the persistent silt stench of the low-tide flats. On either side of the alley, washerwomen leaned over second-story sills. It watched the procession with cold, silent curiosity. Dock wagon drivers leading heavy draft horses pulled to the side of the narrow street, their wooden axle hubs groaning against the granite curbstones.
‘I assure you, Auditor Nenn,’ Corvin said over his shoulder. His voice carried above the rattle of the harbor heavy cart carts, ‘the situation in that kitchen is a coming soon public contagion. An unlicensed fighter using decommissioned relic salvage has summoned an uncontrollable horde of underground demons into a civic food commissary. By noon today, half the bread in Lowbank will be tainted with spirit venom.’
Varo Nenn didn’t quicken his pace. He stepped carefully over a puddle of murky river water, his eyes flicking to the brick walls of the apartments on either side. ‘The complaint filed with our office stated that the kitchen was infested with river beetles, Examiner Hest. A beetle is an arthropod, not a demon. The Board of Works regulates stonework, drainage, and dry storage, not ecclesiastical terrors.’
‘When an unlisted entity enters a town zone through a non-consecrated breach,’ Corvin snapped back. His voice rose in irritation, ‘it’s classified as a demonic incursion under the Civic Concord of thirty-eight! We have full power to seize the premises and condemn the building.’
Nenn adjusted his glasses with a dry sniff. ‘The Civic Concord of thirty-eight also needs the complainant to pay the Board’s check fee in advance if the alleged breach proves to be ordinary livestock or household pests. I trust Master Sorell has deposited the twenty silver coins with the city chamberlain?’
Corvin stiffened, his jaw tightening beneath his cowl. ‘The College doesn’t pay town check fees for civic emergencies.’
‘The Board of Works doesn’t work for ecclesiastical praise, Judge,’ Nenn replied smoothly. ‘Now let us see this terrible disaster.’
They reached the wicket gate of Sister Merrow’s kitchen. Corvin threw the latch open with a dramatic flourish, expecting to find the courtyard abandoned, the porch littered with dead vermin, and the air thick with the stench of decay.
Instead, the courtyard smelled overwhelmingly of baking rye bread and wood smoke. On the porch bench, Sister Merrow’s fresh sourdough crusts were cooling on scrubbed cedar racks under white linen cloths, while three wharf draymen sat on empty salt barrels eating hot porridge from clay pot bowls.
Eren Tal stood by the repair frame stand, quietly dressing an ash axle spindle with a spokeshave. He looked up as the wardens filed into the yard, his face showing neither alarm nor surprise. ‘Morning, Judge. Morning, Auditor Nenn. Boiled tea is hot in the back kitchen if you’ve got a cup.’
Corvin ignored the carpenter, pointing a gloved finger toward the kitchen door. ‘Where is the girl Rook? Where is the demonic swarm reported by the market wardens?’
The kitchen door swung open, and Pella stepped onto the porch. She wore her clean working smock, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, with a clean clipboard in her hand. ‘Auditor Nenn. We received your notice of check thirty minutes ago. The commissary records and cellar inventories are laid out on the bench.’
Corvin pushed past her into the kitchen back kitchen, followed closely by Nenn. The judge’s eyes darted wildly around the room. Across the scrubbed bread table, under the dough troughs, along the stone shelves. The floor was spotless, freshly swept. Then it dusted with a faint, clean line of pipe lime along the baseboards to deter damp.
The scent of fresh bread was intoxicating, mixed with the warm, comforting steam of Sister Merrow’s soup kettles. Along the wet stonework wall, copper measuring ladles hung in gleaming rows, wiped fully clean of grease.
‘Where are they?’ Corvin demanded, spinning on his heel. ‘You had thousands of them crawling through the flour yesterday! You can’t hide an infestation of that size from an ordained judge!’
‘They’re in the nursery, Judge,’ Pella replied calmly. ‘In the lower cellar. If you’d like to go down, Auditor Nenn, the stairs are clear.’
Nenn adjusted his glasses, stepping past Corvin toward the open trapdoor. He took a small brass oil lamp from the wall bracket, lowered his tall frame through the opening. Then he walked down the stone steps. Corvin followed close behind, holding a silver-plated warding wand before his chest like a shield.
The cellar was fully still. The air was cool, smelling of damp river moss and clean river clay. Along the northern wall, arranged in neat, four-tiered rows on cedar risers, sat forty-eight unglazed clay pot pots. In the center of the room, sitting cross-legged on a pine crate with a soft camel-hair brush in his lap, was the street boy Tavi.
The boy was carefully inspecting the rim of pot number fourteen. Inside the vessel, resting in a deep bed of emerald moss, thirty adult beetles sat motionless around their semi-clear egg spirals. Their antennae waved slowly in the eighteen-degree draft.
Tavi didn’t look up, but his fingers remained steady on his brush. ‘Pot fourteen has three new egg sacs since dawn, Pella. Heat is seventeen point eight. All clean.’
Auditor Nenn walked slowly down the aisle between the gravel floor and the baked-clay matrix. He knelt beside pot fourteen, peered through his glasses into the moist inside. Then he pulled a clean white handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped the rim of the pot, examined the cloth for grease or fungal spore dust. Then he found it fully white.
He inspected the drainage holes at the base of the terracotta pots. He tested the moisture content of the cedar battens with his fingernail. ‘Unglazed clay pot on suspended stringers. Tiny blood vessel evaporative cooling. Who engineered this rack?’
‘Our visiting specialist, Imran Bell,’ Pella answered from the base of the stairs. ‘He designed it to maintain a stable eighteen degrees without clockwork power.’
Nenn tapped the side of pot fourteen, watching how the sleeping beetles barely stirred in their moss bed. ‘And the food store above? Have any of these insects breached the grain bins?’
‘Zero breach events since two in the morning,’ Pella said, handing him the clipboard. ‘Sister Merrow sifted fourteen sacks of rye meal at dawn. Zero larvae, zero egg capsules, zero hard shell fragments. The certificate is co-signed by the wagon drivers’ guild representative.’
Nenn walked over to the foundation wall, running his hand over the clean whitewashed lime. ‘The air-flow angled slats in this cellar are thirty years old. But someone has cleared the silt channels and fitted oiled copper mesh across the outside grates. It has been twenty years since I inspected a cellar in Lowbank that had this degree of preventative stonework care.’
He looked down at Tavi, who was gently scooping an escaped larva back into the moss bed with his camel-hair brush. ‘The apprentice works with commendable discipline. Most lads in this quarter would have trampled the pots for copper sport.’
Nenn stood up, took his leather folio from beneath his arm. Then it uncapped his dark oak-ink pen. ‘Examiner Hest,’ Nenn said, his voice flat, dry, and cutting through the quiet cellar like an adze blade. ‘You filed an emergency Level One sanitary fine ticket alleging that this commissary was compromised by dangerous hungry vermin.’
Corvin sputtered, waving his silver wand toward the pots. ‘Look at them! There are thousands of them! They’re river entities harbored in a food storage vault!’
Varo Nenn looked at the rows of orderly, sleeping insects, then at the spotless gravel floor, then down at his check checklist. ‘These are common river lantern beetles, Judge. They’re contained in porous baked-clay evaporative incubators at seventeen degrees, fully isolated from the flour reserves above. The room is cleaner than the commissary at the High Terrace guard post.’
Nenn made a firm, black stroke across his parchment. ‘This is the cleanest, calmest food cellar in the Lower Wards. Where is the hazard?’
Corvin’s face flushed a deep, mottled crimson, his wand shaking in his fist. ‘The hazard is that this was done without college pass-key! She used an unlisted foreign technician to perform civic pest control!’
Nenn closed his folio with a sharp, leather slap. ‘The Board of Works regulates outcomes, Judge, not ecclesiastical monopolies. The flour is clean, the bread is baking, and the public health is protected. Your fine ticket is dismissed.’