The central quadrangle of the Summoners’ College smelled of clipped boxwood, damp gravel, and the oily soot of forty coal fire bowls burning to warm the arcades for visiting patricians. Above the row of stone pillars, the high slate roofs caught the gray northern daylight, channeling melting snow through polished copper downspouts shaped like dragons vomiting clean mountain water into marble water tanks.
Pella Rook walked with her head down, her cart driver boots scuffing the pea gravel. Her left shoulder still burned from the scalding boiler water that had soaked through her tunic in the Vault of Seven Seals, the wet wool stiffening into a rough plaster against her collarbone. In her right hand she carried her cedar flat ruler. She was wrapped in a length of dry oiled canvas to keep the grain from swelling. The wood had been planed to a true sixteenth of an inch. Her father had taught her that if your edge was warped by damp, every line you scribed would lie to you before the chisel even touched the stone.
Two third-year apprentices in sky-blue silk robes passed her, their silver invocation badges clinking musically against their silver-braided girdles. One of them, a youth whose family owned three copper mines in the Upper Tor, glanced at Pella’s ox-hide elbow patches and stepped deliberately into the grass to avoid brushing her canvas apron.
“That’s the ferryman’s girl,” the youth murmured to his friend, his voice loud enough to carry across the damp turf. “The one who broke her own chalk ring because a pipe coughed.”
“They say she threw salt on Master Sorell’s desk,” the other replied, chuckling softly behind a velvet cuff. “No breeding. The tutors told my uncle she spends half her quiet focus hours staring at the lime cracks in the cellar floor. Can’t hold an astral thread for three seconds without twitching.”
Pella didn’t turn her head. She had heard the same words spoken in six different lecture halls over five years. The masters called it spiritual heavy rush or sick distraction. A student was meant to cast their mind into the astral currents to grab an undying salamander by the neck. Then, Pella would freeze. She couldn’t ignore the shudder of the stonework beneath her knees. She couldn’t ignore the friction of the air being sucked through the chimney pipe dampers. Above all, she couldn’t ignore the silence that sat between the words of the summoning litanies.
Traditional summoning was an assault. The manuals in the Great Library, written in ancient high-court dialect and bound in calfskin, described the craft as an act of total sovereign command. You built a circle without flaws. You sealed every joint with silver wire. You shouted the binding names until the spirit broke its will against the barrier and yielded its power to your command rod. The tutors taught that spirits were formless, greedy beasts waiting to devour human mind unless collared with unbending iron wills.
Her father had never used the word command.
Hal Rook had been five feet six inches of knotty river oak, his forearms scarred by frayed hemp cables and his ears deaf to high flutes because of twenty winters spent beside the roaring spillway of the third weir. The college masters had summoned sky drakes to clear the gravel shoals fourteen years ago. Then, Hal had stood on the timber staging with his brass measuring tongs and an iron sounding lead. It shook his head at the great bronze-ringed cages the summoners sank into the channel.
They don’t understand the throat, Pella, Hal had told her while dipping animal fat-soaked rags into hot pine pitch to pay the ferry seams. A river is an animal that has to breathe. If you squeeze its throat with spells, it’ll hold its breath until its ribs crack. Then it’ll take your bridge, your boats, and your children all at once.
Hal had even written a formal proposal on three sheets of cheap butcher’s paper, submitting it to the High Pipe Guild with twenty-four signed names from the Lower Ferry Guild. He had asked for forty crowns to install an extra physical warning bell on the third gate. A simple bronze bell connected to a counterbalanced float that would ring mechanically if the water rose faster than an inch a minute. The High office had rejected the proposal without reading the third sheet. Forty crowns was too much for a clockwork bell. Just then, the college had three ordained third-rank summoners assigned to the river wardens.
Three weeks later, the snowmelt had burst the mountain weirs. The summoners’ magical relays had choked under three thousand tons of liquid ice-slow silt, the sky drakes had turned on their handlers in blind panic. Hal Rook had drowned while holding the manual winch of the third floodgate with his bare hands so forty tenant skiffs could slip into the backwater slough.
The college had granted Hal a bronze funeral plaque on the wharf—six inches wide, screwed to a rot-strewn piling—and given his eight-year-old daughter an indentured back kitchen scholarship to scrub the bunkhouse floors until she reached the age of check. For five years she had cleaned the latrines, hauled strong etching acid. Then she listened to lectures from the drafty back benches.
She reached the Lower Bunkhouse in the north curtain wall. The room was a narrow, windowless stone tunnel carved beneath the low roof wall, damp with slow leak and smelling permanently of wet laundry, stale fat, and boiled parsnip peelings. Twenty wooden cots stood in two rows, separated by eighteen inches of aisle.
Pella knelt beside Cot Fourteen.
From beneath the straw mattress, she pulled her possessions. A cedar chest no larger than a bread box, fitted with iron hasps that Hal had forged from an old anchor link. Inside lay her real inheritance: Hal Rook’s eight-inch brass measuring tongs, their sliding rule stamped with graduation marks from the Old Guild of Watermen. An iron sounding lead weighted with four ounces of antimony. Two coarse wool shirts. A tin mug with a dented rim. And four copper bits sewn into a strip of raw, unwhitened linen.
She stripped off her student tunic. The bottle-green wool was still wet at the shoulder, the coarse fabric pulling painfully at the red blisters forming along her collarbone. She reached into her wash-basin, dipped a rag into cold water. Then she wiped the sweat and white chalk-stone dust from her neck. The cold stung, but it drove the dizziness from her temples. She took a small clay pot of unsalted lard from her chest and spread a thin film over the scalded skin, wincing as the grease coated the raw flesh.
She pulled on a clean, undyed work smock of heavy river hemp, tied her dark hair back with a piece of tarred twine. Then she strapped her canvas apron around her waist. In the apron’s front pockets went the measuring tongs, a stub of black grease pencil, a brass stop bell she had salvaged from an abandoned dredge, and three dry animal fat candles.
Heavy, measured footsteps echoed down the stone steps.
A beadle appeared in the arched doorway. It was Corvin Hest, the junior judge who had sat behind Sorell during the disaster. His long face was flushed from climbing the stairs. He carried a flat iron ring loaded with brass keys that clinked against his thigh like sheep bells. His dark wool cassock was spotted with soot around the hem. His fingers were always stained with blue-black dark oak-ink.
“You’re taking your time, Rook,” Hest said, leaning against the door post. “The sun is already behind the High Tor. The master wants your badge.”
Pella reached into her apron pocket, pulled out the oval piece of stamped brass that bore her apprentice number—Forty-Four—and held it out without speaking.
Hest didn’t take it right away. He looked at her clean hemp smock, then at the small cedar chest sitting on the straw mattress. His lip curled in a dry sneer. “You think you’re going back to the ferry landing to be a hero like your father? The ferry’s gone, girl. The college dismantled the haulage cables last autumn. The new Sluice Crown will do the work of forty boats without a single Lowbank cart driver taking a wage.”
“The river doesn’t care about your Crown, judge,” Pella said evenly. Her voice was flat, devoid of the deference she had worn for five years like a tight wool collar.
“Mind your mouth,” Hest barked. He snatched the brass badge from her palm with enough force to scrape the skin of her thumb. “You aren’t a student now. You’re an unlicensed loiterer on private institutional ground. And before you take that wooden box through the water gate, you owe the college three hours of labor to balance your mess account.”
“My mess account was cleared on the first of the month,” Pella said. “I scrubbed the chemical troughs in the potion-made annex. Two full days of lye and foam-stone.”
“The master added twenty copper bits for the damaged oak desk and the spilled ink,” Hest said. He pulled a slip of gray paper from his sleeve and tapping it against his palm. “You want to leave without the beadles cracking your shins with ash staves? You go down to Relic Sub-Cellar 4. The storage gallery beneath the old west castle wall. There’s forty years of rusted iron cages and broken binding slate down there that has to be dragged to the gravel ramp before the court guard locks the sub-level at midnight.”
Pella looked at him. The cold in her fingers was steady. Sub-Cellar 4 was the deepest foundation in the college, carved directly into the bedrock where the castle joined the ancient river bluffs. Nobody went down there except when the seasonal damp threatened to rot the foundation timbers. It was cold, dark, and notoriously stuffy.
“Give me the key,” Pella said.
Hest detached a heavy, pitted iron key from his ring and tossed it onto the straw mattress. “Leave the key on the hook by the gravel ramp when you’re done. And don’t steal any brass scrap, Rook. The gatekeeper will weigh your cedar box before you step onto the public wharf.”
He turned and strode back up the hall, his boots ringing against the stone.
Pella waited until the sound of his footsteps died away. She picked up the iron key. It was cold, greasy with sheep fat to ward off rust, and smelled of cellar damp.
She picked up her cedar chest by its hemp handle. She tucked the cedar flat ruler under her left arm. Then she walked toward the spiral stair that led down into the foundations of Lathmere.