In the quiet hour after the basin contact was cut, Pella Rook sat at the back kitchen table with three dry grease pencils laid in a row before her: black, indigo, and vermilion. Her fingers were still chilled from the contact with the lead basin. But the trembling in her tendons had subsided under the steadying warmth of Sister Merrow’s bitter boiled tea.
Across the table, Senior Surveyor Korr Var unrolled a fresh sheet of heavy rag drafting paper, weighting its curling edges with two iron plumb bobs and a brass measuring tongs box. The room smelled of wet stonework, damp wool, and the sharp, acidic tang of fresh dark oak-ink drying on Eren Tal’s clockwork drawings.
“Tell me about the towers, Pella,” Korr said, dipping his ruling pen into a heavy clay inkwell. “Don’t give me poetry or spiritual impressions. Give me map points, spans, and elevations. If we’re to present this memory to the Municipal Works Committee, it must stand as building survey, not visions from an opium den.”
Pella picked up the indigo pencil. Then she drew a bold, curved line representing the riverbed of the Gray Rush as it bent around the granite shoulder of Lowbank. “There were three wooden towers, Korr. The first stood on the north gravel bar, sixty yards above the modern academy intake. The second was anchored to the middle pier. The very pier that Sorell demolished to lay his high-pressure cement plug. The third stood on the south quay, right where…
