The cold morning light coming through the high window row of the Ferry Landing workshop revealed a thick layer of river mist hanging over the floor flags. Along the whitewashed stone wall, Senior Surveyor Korr Var stood on a heavy oak bench, a broad steel lettering chisel in his left hand and a wooden mallet in his right. He was cutting the letters of Law Six directly into the stonework above the tool board, each stroke sending a sharp shower of limestone dust down onto the shavings below.
Beside the bench, Pella Rook held the weighted drop-line and a clay pot jar of black dark oak-ink mixed with boiled linseed oil to blacken the carved grooves. On the table sat a half-eaten loaf of sourdough crust and two mugs of strong boiled tea, steam rising faintly into the damp chill of the room. The air smelled of wet stonework, river loam, and the bitter sulfur tang of pipe lime drifting from the open under-road drains.
“Hold the line steady, Pella,” Korr Var instructed, resting the mallet against his thigh. “If the letters lean by two degrees, every academy judge who walks through that door will claim the codex was carved by drunken ditch-diggers. When a building law is cut into stone, it must have the straight-across rigor of a quay wall.”
