The Municipal Registry and Works Office occupied the ground-floor vault of the Old Weigh-House on Market Slip, sandwiched between the salt-fish checker’s booth and the court guard’s pound. Unlike the sunlit marble galleries of the Summoners’ College up on High Tor, the Registry smelled permanently of damp sheep-parchment, coal-ash cinders tracked in from the wharf, and the sour animal fat used to grease the chains of the harbor crane next door.
At ten minutes before four in the afternoon—just as the early winter dusk was turning the leaded casements the color of tarnished pewter—Pella Rook stepped up to the scarred oak counter. She wore her cleanest bottle-green wool tunic, brushed free of lime dust, with the pale oval over the left breast where her apprentice badge had been unpicked showing plainly in the yellow light of the clerk’s oil lamp. Under her right arm she carried a three-foot cardboard map tube Ada had donated from the back of her transit van, stopped at both ends with turned ash plugs. In her left hand she held her leather-bound night-shift ledger.
Behind the iron grille of the counter, Town Auditor Nenn was totaling a column of wharfage checks with an iron-gall quill, a wool muffler wrapped twice around his thin neck against the draft from the cellar stairs. In the back corner of the room, seated beside the cast-iron coal stove with his mud-splashed riding boots propped on a brass fender, Chief Inspector Corvin Hest was paring a hard winter apple with…
