Dawn broke over Lathmere at six o’clock in a long, ragged slash of stormy pewter light. It was low rain-clouds tearing across the slate roofs of the High Terrace. Meanwhile, the gorge to the north glowed with the dull, coppery red of an autumn storm. Between the wet stonework quays of Lowbank and the stone piers of the High Bridge, the Gray Rush roared through the city like a mill-race at full flood, its swollen brown currents thick with mountain pine-trash, yellow clay foam. A heavy silt stench that filled every street within three blocks of the embankment.
In the spacious ground-floor washroom and adjoining courtyard of the Old Ferry warehouse, Senior Surveyor Korr Var stood before the four-foot brick frame of the Courtesy Arch, his dark Sea-court broadcloth cloak fastened at the throat with silver anchor-clasps and his court warrant metal tube clipped to his sword-belt.
Ranked in double file across the wet pine floorboards and out under the courtyard awning stood forty master guild artificers. Twenty senior dockwrights led by Guildmaster Renn Vos. It carried twelve-inch steel box-wrenches, bronze drift-punches, and heavy striking mauls. Ten veteran lightermen shouldering ash pinch-bars and two-ton cast-iron jackscrews greased with sheep fat. And ten kiln-masons with leather buckets of quick-setting high-pressure Roman cement and broad brass pointing trowels. Each craftsperson wore a loop of raw, unwhitened linen ribbon pinned to the left shoulder, and around every neck hung one of Pella’s tuned brass Courtesy stop-bells.
