Dark storm clouds rolled off the Three Rivers outside the barred back kitchen window. It blotted out the pale morning sun and turned Sister Merrow’s kitchen the color of wet pewter. A sharp smell of ozone, cold autumn rain, and scorched animal fat crept across the flat stone slabs as Master Davin Sorell’s polite academy veneer vanished.
The air in the back kitchen grew freezing cold as Sorell’s latent magical aura flared. That made her skin prickle with static. Pella kept Hal’s measuring tongs held firmly in her coat pocket. She had felt this high-hum air-pressure drop once before during her third-year check in the College tiered arena, when an arch-summoner brought three compulsory binding seals to bear on a recalcitrant quarry elemental.
Sorell dropped his polite veneer and openly threatened to classify the Courtesy Workshop as an illegal sabotage conspiracy. He didn’t touch the bronze badge on the bread board. He left it lying beside the rye crust as though it were contaminated with sewer silt.
Sorell stood up from the stool. His velvet cloak swept back to reveal the heavy golden hydra medallion at his chest. Pella used her sound sensitivity tracking his vocal tremor. She tracked a desperate, autocratic rage masking deep load-bearing terror of the Third Gate’s exposure. An authoritarian regime can no longer purchase silence. Then, its only leftover response is state violence dressed in legal syntax. Beneath his royal bluster, Sorell was scared of what a timed together clockwork and living audit of the…
