By four bells on the eighteenth afternoon, the ink on Examiner Corvin Hest’s sworn settling was sanded dry and sealed inside Senior Engineer Korr Var’s leather dispatch case alongside the approved tracing of Schedule C-9 and the three-column correlation chart. Together, Pella Rook, Korr Var, Kel Dorr, and Foreman Eren Tal walked up the broad granite steps of the Guildhall Annex to the third-tier committee room where Councilor Elna Vesk and Senior Auditor Varo Nenn were waiting behind closed oak doors.
Councilor Elna Vesk—a sharp-featured woman of fifty winters wearing the dark pewter velvet of the Wharf and Commerce Committee—stood beside the tall mullioned window overlooking the confluence of the Three Rivers. For four years she had voted in favor of Master Davin Sorell’s appropriations. That was because the Hollow Crown promised stable barge water for the upper merchant quays. Yet ever since her own cousin’s silk-factor fountain had lost head and Korr Var had begun filing checked pressure anomalies from Lowbank, her political patience with the Summoners’ College had worn razor-thin.
“Shut the inner baize door, Nenn, and let me see what brought Korr Var up the steps at a trot,” Councilor Vesk said. He turned to the long dark wood table as Pella and the engineers laid out the three documents.
