The Lower Ditch smelled permanently of oak bark, sour tannin liquor. The dark, rotten-egg silt stench that seeped from the riverbed at low water. Master Kael’s tannery occupied three cavernous brick vaults beneath the embankment road, where forty oak vats stood sunken into the flat stone slabs, their dark brown liquids slowly pickling heavy steer hides.
Today, the liquid in vats nine, ten, and eleven was not cold. A thick, sickening steam was rising from the surface, smelling of scalded leather, boiled lime, and putrefying flesh. Master Kael stood on the wet timber narrow high walkway between the pits. He held an iron hide-hook in one white-knuckled fist while two apprentice boys scooped floating scum into grease buckets.
Kael was a broad, stooped man of sixty with leather-stained arms that looked like polished walnut. He wore a stiff apron of greased cowhide, his gray hair tied back with a hemp string. When Pella Rook and Eren Tal walked through the low brick archway, Kael didn’t look up from the steaming vat.
Along the wet stonework of the vault walls, thick coatings of pipe lime had begun flaking into the drainage gutters, dislodged by the persistent shaking of the underground channels. Flakes of lime fell like gray snow into the sour bark broth.
