For the next forty minutes, Pella Rook, Kel Dorr, and Senior Town Engineer Korr Var worked line by line down the linen thick parchment of Schedule C-9. She turned the sterile academy jargon of Master Davin Sorell’s clerk hall into plain building terms on the workshop slate. Thirteen-year-old Tavi stood at the end of the bench sharpening cedar pencils and laying out clean sheets of rag paper. Meanwhile, Foreman Eren Tal kept watch by the alley window in case academy court guards came sniffing down Fish Street for the misfiled archive crate.
What struck Korr Var first was the extraordinary care with which the schedule’s authors had disguised the extraction gearwork behind office euphemisms. Nowhere on the three-foot sheet did the words spirit, mind, or memory appear in the main column headers. Instead, the living water-system awareness of Senn was labeled Sub-Weir Baseline Retention Pool. The forced stripping of its hundreds of years-old seasonal flood recollections was termed Harmonic Pattern Skimming for Predictive Stabilization.
“Look at Note Seven in the lower left margin,” Korr Var said. He tapped the thick parchment with the brass tip of his dividers. “The junior clerks who compiled these weekly gauge tables probably had no clearer idea what they were measuring than a mill-boy reading a boiler glass. They were told that whenever the Residual Pattern Index dropped by two points, the upper terrace fountain headers gained three-tenths of a pound of steady head balance.”
