The latch on the washroom outer door didn’t click. It was kicked open.
The sudden blast of cold river air sent the wood shavings on Eren’s bench skittering across the flat stone slabs. It carried the sharp, sweet smell of bergamot pomade, damp woolen broadcloth, and dark oak-ink drying on calfskin thick parchment. Pella Rook went rigid by the water trough. Her right hand, holding a lump of dry pipe lime, froze inches above the stone basin. That scent belonged to only one place in Lathmere. The High College of Summoners, three hundred feet above the mud of Lowbank on the sunlit granite cliffs of the upper terraces.
Corvin Hest stepped across the threshold, his polished black calfskin boots clicking with sharp power on the grit. At twenty-eight, he wore the dark navy woolen tunic of an accredited Junior Judge, its collar stiffened with whalebone and lined with silver cord. Over his breast hung the heavy silver disc of the Municipal Proctorate, bearing the embossed crest of the Three Converging Rivers. In his gloved right hand he held an ivory-tipped dark wood check rod, its metal ring scarred by countless peremptory taps against tavern doors and workshop benches.
Behind him in the alleyway stood two junior academy beadles in boiled-leather cuirasses. Their iron pikes were held upright against the drizzling sky.
“Pella Rook,” Corvin said. His voice carried the smooth, ringing projection drilled into academy initiates in the echo-halls of the upper tiered halls. He didn’t look at her face. His gaze swept the room with cold and exact disdain. He took in the grease-stained pine table, Sister Merrow’s iron stockpot bubbling on the hearth, and the piles of ash timber leaning against the wet stonework. “We received an informational filing at the third bell. A report of unlicensed magical discharge and unbonded material transference in the river quarters. Master Sorell doesn’t tolerate hedge-sorcery while the town water gate works are under office review.”
Pella felt her chest tighten with five years of ingrained panic. Her spine involuntarily tried to drop into the submissive, hunched stance of an unpaid back kitchen apprentice. For five years, Corvin Hest had been the judge who checked her chalk lines, threw out her wash water if it contained a single hair. Then it deducted three silver coins from her food share whenever an elemental spirit refused her summons.
“Examiner Hest,” Pella stammered, her throat dry as sand. She wiped her lime-crusted palms against her canvas apron, the coarse hemp scratching against her raw knuckles. “This is... This is only Sister Merrow’s washroom. We’re repairing the floor dunnage for the wagon drivers’ barley sacks. There’s no illegal circle here.”
“Don’t insult my office, girl,” Corvin said, taking two slow steps into the room. His boots avoided the puddles of water drops with practiced fastidiousness. “A third-year initiate can smell the ozone of an open breach from half a mile downstream. You were expelled for total spiritual incompetence fourteen months ago. You couldn’t compel a common marsh-sprite to boil an egg. If you have been attempting to draw power from the lower under-road drains without an academy license, you’ll spend the winter breaking road-metal in the southern quarries.”
He paused, his gray eyes fixing on the corner pier.
Against the damp granite blocks stood the brass Courtesy Arch. Its green rust-crusted frame was humming with a low, nonstop clockwork hum, the pale blue slate glyphs along its top door beam glowing softly in the washroom shadows. The doorway was open, its sky-slit shimmering like a thin pane of oiled silk. It showed the blurred dark shape of a wet asphalt road and brick row houses three worlds away.
Corvin’s face hardened. “An unmapped portal. Unsanctioned brass alloy. No binding runes. No warding chains. No offering salt outer edge.”
He turned his check rod toward the workbench beside the meal bin.
There sat Imran Bell.
The exterminator was sitting on an upturned wooden crate, fully undisturbed by the academy intrusion. His light metal folding clipboard rested flat on the bench, alongside five heat-proof glass vials standing upright in their foam transport block. Imran held his ten-power sight magnifying glass in his left eye socket, squinting through the lens as he used his stainless steel tweezers to position a dead gallery beetle on a clean white card. In his right hand, a clockwork clutch pencil was carefully printing: Sub-species: Alluvial Excavator. Belly thermoluminescence checked.
He didn’t look up. He didn’t drop his tweezers. He simply clicked the pencil button once to extend another tiny fraction of an inch of graphite.
Corvin took a sharp breath, his kidskin gloves tightening around the dark wood rod. In the holy cosmology of the Summoners’ College, any entity that emerged through an interdimensional sky-slit without human ancestry in Lathmere was classified under the Penal Code of Imperial Sorcery. An unbonded extra-flat entity, a flat familiar, or a rogue demon drawn from the dark outer void.
“By the Three Rivers,” Corvin whispered. He stepped forward with his rod raised, his eyes scanning Imran’s khaki overalls, the red oval patch on his chest, and his steel-shanked rubber boots. “A terrestrial familiar. A homunculus of the lower mud, clothed in foreign hemp.”
Eren Tal took half a step forward from the wall, his adze lowered but his broad shoulders squaring. “He isn’t a demon, Judge. He’s a—”
“Silence, woodcutter!” Corvin snapped, his voice ringing against the lime-washed stone. He brought the ivory tip of his rod down onto the bench six inches from Imran’s glass vials with a violent, cracking crack.
The shock shook through the pine timber, causing the glass vials to rattle against their foam partitions.
Imran didn’t flinch. He slowly lowered his tweezers, took the jeweler’s magnifying glass from his eye socket. Then he placed it neatly on the grid paper. Then he turned his head, looking directly at the silver-badged judge standing over him.
“Mind the glassware, mate,” Imran said. His voice was entirely calm. It was marked by the dry, flat rhythm of a South Yorkshire town worker who had spent fifteen years dealing with aggressive Alsatians, abusive landlords, and drunk tenants on council estates. “That heat-proof glass is three pounds fifty a vial. The council doesn’t reimburse for breakages caused by third parties.”
Corvin stared at him, his face flushing crimson with offended dignity. In all his years as a judge, he had never heard an extra-flat familiar speak with anything other than deep-throated hisses, terrifying telepathic wails, or begging on their knees pleas for mercy. To be addressed as ‘mate’ by a creature of the threshold was a direct affront to four hundred years of academy doctrine.
“It possesses human speech,” Corvin murmured, his lip curling in revulsion. He stepped back two inches, resting his left hand on the handle knob of his short silver ritual dagger. “An advanced binding. Dangerous. Deceitful. Made by an unlicensed hedge-witch to mimic the manner of an artisan.”
He leveled the ivory rod straight at the bridge of Imran’s nose.
“Hear the decree of the High College, creature!” Corvin projected, his voice rising in ritual rhythm. “By the power of the Three Converging Rivers, the Town Senate of Lathmere. The Master of the Central Sluice, I command you to reveal your true form! Drop your counterfeit tools, drop to your knees, and prostrate yourself before an ordained judge of the First Circle! Speak your binding name, or I shall sever your umbilical tether with consecrated silver!”
The two beadles in the doorway lowered their pikes, the steel points leveling at Imran’s chest.
Pella felt her heart hammering wildly in her throat. The silver dagger at Corvin’s hip was real. Academy test judges had full summary turf over unlicensed summons. Under the town charter, a judge had the legal power to purge an unlisted familiar on the spot with cold silver, and any apprentice harboring such an entity was sentenced to twenty years in the salt mines without a trial.
“Judge, please!” Pella cried out, stepping between Corvin and the bench, her hands raised in desperate supplication. “He hasn’t harmed anyone! He isn’t a demon! It was an accident—a clockwork deep ring through an old storage frame! He was only looking at the beetles!”
Corvin sneered, not looking at her. “Move aside, Rook, before I add harboring an unlisted extra-flat horror to your indictment. The creature will submit to the binding collar, or it will be destroyed.”
Corvin’s eyes drifted toward the slate board mounted on the stone pier. The board was divided into neat chalk columns, covered in Pella’s iron-gall notations, Hal Rook’s measuring tongs dimensions, and Imran’s heat degrees. There were no sigils of binding, no blood offerings, and no astrological charts. Only cold, arithmetic numbers: forty-eight degrees, thirty-two pounds of pressure, fourteen tiny fractions of an inch of seam shifted weight.
“What’s this gibberish?” Corvin demanded, flicking the corner of the slate with his ivory rod. “Where are the sacred world-size pentacles? Where are the holding seals? You dare to summon a terrestrial dweller into a common bakery back kitchen without an iron warding circle? This is gross heresy against the Archchancellor’s Third Edict!”
Sister Merrow stepped forward from the hearth. Her stout ash cane struck the flat stone slabs with a heavy, hollow thud. Her gray hair was tucked beneath a grease-stained linen kerchief, and in her right hand she held a dripping iron ladle filled with hot cabbage broth.
“Put that stick down before I feed it to you, Corvin Hest,” Sister Merrow said, her gravelly voice cutting through the judge’s rhetoric like a butcher’s saw. “You were a snot-nosed boy stealing dried apples from my kitchen stall before you bought that silver badge with your uncle’s timber money. This is an active hospital kitchen and draymen’s back kitchen. If you bring those iron pikes one foot closer to my meal bin, I’ll have sixty wagon drivers from the river guild waiting for you on the quays with heavy haulage chains. Now back away from that bench.”
Corvin stiffened, his jaw working as color flared across his high cheekbones. In Lowbank, Sister Merrow was an institution. Even the town court guards didn’t cross her threshold without removing their helmets. But the presence of the brass arch and the foreign creature in khaki overalls gave Corvin the scent of career advancement. To seize an unlisted familiar and expose an illegal summoning workshop would guarantee his promotion to Senior Proctor of the Central Sluice.
“The Church has no turf over unlawful summoning, Sister,” Corvin said through clenched teeth, though his boots didn’t advance. “The Penal Code is total. Unlisted extra-flat entities are town contraband. They’re either enslaved under academy seal or purged with silver.”
Imran didn’t wait for the debate to conclude. He picked up his clockwork clutch pencil, clicked the top twice to retract the graphite lead into the brass barrel. Then he slipped it into the narrow pocket on his forearm designed for test tools. Then, with deliberate, unrushed care, he took his six heat-proof glass vials, checked that each screw cap was tightened exactly against its black rubber seal ring. Then he slid them into their protective slots in the closed-cell foam block.
“Look at it,” Corvin breathed, gesturing with his rod toward the glass vials. “Collecting river humors. Harvesting the city’s vital essence into crystal phials for an infernal rite.”
“They’re soil and mortar samples, son,” Imran said. He wiped a speck of pipe lime from the base of the foam block with his thumb. “And if you keep shouting inside a damp stone basement with stuffy chimney pipes, you’re going to give yourself a vocal polyp. My name is Imran Bell. I work for Bell and Bell Outside Services in Harrowby. I’m not an entity, I’m not a homunculus. I don’t have a binding name, unless you count what my cousin Sal calls me when I forget to log my mileage on the ring road.”
Imran looked at the ivory-tipped rod pointing at his forehead. Then he reached calmly into his breast pocket, took out a clean white cotton handkerchief. Then he wiped a smudge of dust from the lens of his sight magnifying glass.
“First of all,” Imran said, folding the handkerchief with careful care and tucking it back into his khaki overalls, “pointing a stick at people’s faces is a workplace safety rule-break under Section Two of the Health and Safety at Work Act. Second, nobody is destroying my tools. And third, young man, you have about seven minutes before my lunch break is over. I haven’t even finished my tea.”