White afternoon sunlight glared off the polished marble steps of the College of Summoners’ South Gate. That made Pella Rook’s patched wool apprentice coat and mud-caked Lowbank boots look like something dragged up from a barge canal. The air on the High Terraces smelled of cedar incense, clipped boxwood hedges, and rosewater sprinkled by street sweepers to keep the limestone dust from settling on the velvet hems of passing exam guards. Under her left arm, Pella carried a linen-bound folio sealed with Town Auditor Varo Nenn’s crimson wax stamp.
Her calves burned from the steep two-mile climb up the tiered switchbacks from Fish Street. The scalded skin on her right wrist pulled tight against her linen bandage every time she shifted the heavy folio. Before the twenty-foot bronze grille stood two academy spear guards in burnished steel breastplates, their polearms crossed at chest height to bar the public archway while students in clean cerulean robes strolled past the inner quadrangle fountains.
Inside the linen portfolio lay fourteen pages of hands-on proof that any honest high-pressure engineer could verify in half an hour. The 1740 town water gate elevations signed by Master Karr, the fourteen-point-tiny acidic lime-etch readings from the Southern Dungeon wall, Ada Morland’s pressure-surge curves. The eighteen-cycle-per-minute distress rhythm recorded from the sealed western relief channel.
