The washroom behind Sister Merrow’s kitchen was quiet. It smelled of cold lye soap, damp limestone, and the sharp, pine-tar odor of Eren’s tool chest. On the large slate board mounted against the stonework wall, Pella Rook had pinned Kel Dorr’s foundation blueprints using small lumps of beeswax. Two oil lamps sat on the workbench. It cast a bright, yellow circle of light across the fine, detailed drafting ink. Outside, the night fog was rolling off the Gray Rush, muffling the distant cries of river watchmen on the quays.
Pella held Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs in her right hand, her thumb tracing the fine-scale screw. Her eyes burned with fatigue after sixteen hours on her feet. But her mind was razor-sharp. Across the table, Eren Tal was scraping the edge of a pine ruler with a piece of broken glass, producing fine, fragrant curls of wood that fell onto the flat stone slabs. Sister Merrow sat in the corner, step by step shelling dried peas into an iron pot, the rhythmic ping-ping of the peas providing a steady, domestic rhythm to their work.
‘Look at the return pipe hub, Eren,’ Pella said. She tapped the measuring tongs against a complex circular glyph in the center of the thick parchment. ‘Sorell didn’t design a standard drainage interceptor. This is a looping summoning array. In standard academy summoning, when a spirit performs work, the contract includes a discharge loop that returns the energy to the river bed to fade the heat…
