Corvin stood in the cold ante-room of the High Guildhall. His woolen apprentice robes smelled of the damp river fog he had walked through from the South Ferry. In his right hand he carried an official academy folio bound in black calfskin. He was stamped with the leaden seal of the Department of Public Works.
Inside the folio lay twelve pages of dense, plain notes: drawings of Eren Tal’s four-pound shear-pin, transcripts of Sister Merrow’s medical logs from the washroom, and the exact timetable of the clockwork stop-bell trials conducted by the Lowbank dockwrights. Corvin had spent three days checking the tolerances himself with his own brass measuring tongs.
The heavy oak doors swung open with a muffled groan of iron hinges. Grand Master Sorell was seated behind a huge walnut drafting table strewn with height blueprints, brass dividers, and half-eaten trenchers of cold roast beef. The room was heated by a fine china stove that smelled of expensive bituminous coal, a stark contrast to the bitter reek of boiled tea and wet stonework that clung to Corvin’s clothes.
“You have been spending too many hours on the lower slipways, Corvin,” Sorell said without looking up from a parchment detailing the water gate hoists. “Your tunic carries the silt stench of the Fish Street gutters. When a scholar rolls in river mud, he begins to think like an eel.”
