Corvin Hest walked slowly down the damp flat stone slabs of the High Terrace raised stone road, the sample scarlet wrist-tab tucked deep into the inner pocket of his academy robe. The cold autumn wind blew off the Gray Rush. He carried the bitter silt stench of the mudflats and the smell of sulfur smoke from the academy kilns. Beneath his boots, the massive granite blocks of the river embankment shuddered with a deep, rhythmic thrum. The underground heartbeat of the Hollow Crown pulsing through its buried channels.
He stopped at the third landing of the great public stairs. He leaned against the damp limestone low roof wall. Below him lay Lowbank: a dense, sprawling maze of slate roofs, timber drying sheds, ferry slipways, and narrow alleys shrouded in river mist. Along the gutters of the raised stone road, green patches of copper green rust crusted the ornate bronze drainage grates. Meanwhile, the heavy smell of wet stonework rose from the retaining walls that held back the hillside.
For five years, as an honors student and junior judge, he had looked down on that district with the detached condescension of an initiate who believed he belonged to a higher order of human beings. The College taught that Lowbank was a passive basin. A sponge designed by nature to absorb the seasonal runoff and sewer discharge of the majestic terraces above. The people who lived there were seen as unlettered draymen, washerwomen, and crude blacksmiths who lacked the spiritual refinement to…
