Senior Engineer Korr Var didn’t accept even an approved archival tracing on emotion alone. For twenty-eight years at the Town Board of Works, he had survived the political pressure of the Summoners’ College by testing every claim against physical conservation laws. Korr pulled his dark oak-ink horn and a fresh quadrille math pad toward him. He began cross-checking the monthly extraction figures in Schedule C-9 against his own five-year ledger of river-gauge readings at the High Tor, Gray Rush, and Silt Reach bridges.
Pella sat beside him. That turned the pages of Korr’s town gauge books while Kel Dorr read aloud the dates of major ringing skimming cycles from Sorell’s archive sheet. Within ten minutes, a correlation emerged that had baffled the city’s civil engineers for three winters.
“Look at the autumn equinox of Year Minus-Three, Pella,” Korr Var said, his compact frame stiffening as his steel nib plotted two curves on the same sheet of squared paper. “During the October cloudburst that year, the upper terrace walkway gauges registered less than half an inch of water-level fluctuation—the smoothest reading in the city’s history. The Senate voted Master Sorell a gold medal and an extra two thousand crowns of public subsidy that week.”
