A six-foot drafting board built of planed pine planks was laid flat across two sawhorses in the center of the warehouse. Pinned to the wood by four forged iron tacks was the official Imperial Drainage Map of Lathmere, surveyed forty years ago by the Admiralty Navigation Board. The thick parchment was yellowed with age, stained with dried river water and linseed oil, its fine, detailed copperplate engravings detailing the stone drain-tunnels, water gate gates, and tidal water chutes of the lower city.
Senior Surveyor Korr Var stood over the board, an ivory-and-brass rolling parallel rule in his left hand and a fine quill dipped in black dark oak-ink in his right. Beside him, Varo, the elderly docks scribe, sat on a low stool with a ledger of tenant complaints, reading out the dates, times, and water heat levels recorded by neighborhood volunteers. The air smelled of wet stonework, lamp kerosene, ink, and the bitter, familiar silt stench drifting up through the floorboards.
“Entry thirty-four,” Varo called out, his watery old eyes squinting at his cramped shorthand. “Tuesday morning, seven-fifteen. Fish Street number twelve, cellar laundry. Water backed up through the floor drain at one hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit. Left two inches of white pipe lime crust on the flat stone slabs. Lantern beetles evacuated into the coal bunker.”
