Corvin Hest sat on an upturned salt-herring barrel in the corner of Sister Merrow’s kitchen washroom, his knees pulled up to support an iron-bound audit register that smelled of vinegar and damp calfskin. His college robe—fine, raw, unwhitened linen with blue silk piping along the lapels—was tucked carefully between his shins to keep the hem out of the grey puddle weeping from the floor drain.
In five years as an associate judge for the Summoners’ College, Corvin had audited seventy-three private summoning vaults across the Upper Terraces. He had inspected sky aviary circles where lesser storm-falcons screeched against gold-leaf wards. He had inventoried underground salamander kilns where master alchemists bound fire-elementals with salt-peter and blood-iron collars. In every vault, the hierarchy was total. The summoner stood at the focus of the chalk, holding the inscribed silver focus wand. The entity knelt or paced within the unbroken outer rim of the binding runes, its will crushed beneath the nonstop mental pressure of the academy license.
Here, in this drafty river back kitchen, there was no silver wand. There was no unbroken ring. There was only a portable archway of rusted through scrap brass, roughly three paces high, braced against the wall with two notched spruce floor beams and three iron lag screws that looked as though they had been salvaged from a broken heavy cart wagon.
