The Lowbank Almshouse sat on a damp limestone spit between the lower barge canal and the disused timber slipways. Its stone walls were thick, rounded by two hundred years of river floods. Then it crusted with cold salt efflorescence that looked like frozen mold in the grey morning fog. Inside, the long dayroom smelled of wet stonework, damp wool blankets, boiled tea. The sharp sulfur reek of cheap lignite burning in three cast-iron fire baskets.
Pella Rook followed Auditor Varo Nenn down the flat stone slab aisle, her heavy work boots clicking against the hollow-sounding stones. Beside her, Eren Tal carried his leather field satchel, his knuckles raw from the biting river chill. Every window grate along the riverward wall was crusted with thick copper green rust, shedding pale greenish flakes onto the doorstep whenever the damp wind gusted against the glass.
In the corner beside the center hearth sat three old men in patched frieze smocks. Their hands were broad, gnarl-jointed from decades of wrestling timber winch-spindles. Then they marked with the pale, ragged scars left by snapping hemp mooring lines.
The eldest was Renn Vos. He was seventy-one years old, sat wrapped in a coarse cart driver’s horse-blanket. Then he leaned his chin on an old brass-capped ash sounding stick. His right eyelid drooped from an ancient stroke. But his left eye was as pale and clear as river gravel under six inches of winter water.
