Harsh morning daylight cut through the greasy back kitchen fog around the bread board in Sister Merrow’s kitchen, glinting off a freshly unrolled sheet of heavy calfskin thick parchment. The air smelled sharply of boiling turnip water, green alder smoke from the hearth, damp limestone. The acidic bite of academy dark oak-ink. Outside the barred window, shallow river puddles rippled with the four-second ground tremor that had crept into the lower ward since the moon turned.
Her pulse was steady at sixty beats a minute, her boots planted firmly on the wet sawdust. Pella kept her wooden ruler and Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs resting against her canvas apron. All night she had reviewed the transcript of Auditor Varo Nenn’s covert ledger check from the town water office. Between eleven at night and four in the morning, Master Davin Sorell’s crew had been running unlogged high-pressure extraction cycles through the Silt Gallery, dumping the white-hot cooled water straight into the old brick interceptors beneath Fish Street.
Sorell laid out the legal gearwork of the appointment, requiring Pella to transfer all Courtesy Bridge patents to the College archives. Sorell smoothed the corners of the parchment down between a sack of coarse salt and Dima Fen’s coiled leather-and-brass spreading collar, weighting the top edge with Pella’s surrendered bronze apprentice badge.
