The Aldermanic Chamber of the Fourth Ward sat on the third tier of City Hall, overlooking the crowded slate roofs of Lowbank and the churning grey confluence of the Three Rivers. The room smelled of beeswax floor polish, cold wet stonework, dry sheepskin parchment. The bitter dregs of boiled tea that had been sitting in a clay pot since mid-morning. Outside the tall lancet casements, the rain fell in a slow, relentless veil, streaking the soot-stained limestone sills with dark rivulets of soot and river grit.
Councilor Elna Vesk stood by the tall arched window, her hands clasped loosely behind her back. She was fifty-two years old, wore a tailored coat of dark green woolen broadcloth with silver-plated guild buttons. Then she possessed the sharp, unsentimental gaze of a woman who had spent twenty years managing riverfront timber warehouses before entering town politics. At her collar, a small silver brooch in the shape of a land-mapper’s weighted drop-line caught the cold northern light.
On her broad dark wood desk lay the evidence: the ancient survey thick parchment from the Sub-Vaults, the signed settling of Renn Vos bearing three inked thumbprints. Pella Rook’s linen map of Lowbank, its nine red grease pencil dots gleaming like fresh wounds across the drafted streets. Near the corner of the blotter, a small saucer held a dried sourdough crust and a scrap of chalk used for tallying tax exemptions.
