Ten minutes after leaving Orwin Pell’s wicket, Pella Rook and Foreman Eren Tal followed Senior Auditor Varo Nenn down twenty-two worn limestone steps into the Sub-Vault Index Room beneath the Guildhall courtyard.
Here the damp chill of the riverbank seeped even through two-foot cut stone walls, countered only by shallow pans of roasted charcoal and bags of bitter pine-resin hung from the iron tier-rods to keep silverfish out of the parchment rolls.
Long oak reading tables stood beneath hooded whale-oil lamps. It was flanked by floor-to-ceiling racks where two hundred years of sewer checks, wharfage tallies, and under-road drain easements were bound in rough calfskin.
At the end of the third aisle, Junior Clerk Mallow—a pale twenty-year-old copyist with violet academy ink on his cuffs—stood beside a chained lectern holding the Fourth Ward Sluice Register.
Mallow recognized Pella’s unbadged green apprentice tunic. Then, he hurriedly slammed the heavy wooden cover of Volume Nine shut and laid both forearms across the brass clasps.
“This volume is under academy reservation, Auditor Nenn!” Mallow blurted, his voice cracking in the vaulted quiet of the cellar. “Judge Vane from Master Davin Sorell’s clerk hall came down yesterday afternoon and left a written directive that no person outside the Hollow Crown building staff may inspect the Eastern Terrace water-table folios.”
