By ten bells on the eighteenth night, the courtyard gates behind Sister Merrow’s communal kitchen were barred with heavy oak drop-beams, and two reliable night-watchmen from the draymen’s guild sat beneath the porch lantern beside the covered eighteen-foot water chute wagon. Inside the warm washroom, the animal fat lamps burned low over the scrubbed pine bread table where Pella Rook sat making the final nightly entry in the Courtesy Workshop’s master register.
Across the room, Foreman Eren Tal was hanging the clean reed-cloth check coats and face-coverings on the cedar wall pegs he had mortised into the stonework. Meanwhile, Sister Merrow checked the linen bandages and antiseptic wash bottles in the trauma chest. Master Engineer Korr Var and Kel Dorr had left half an hour earlier with duplicate copies of Schedule C-9 and Corvin Hest’s sworn paper locked in separate iron dispatch boxes—one bound for Clerk Varo Nenn’s fireproof vault at City Hall, the other for Korr’s own strongroom—so no midnight raid by academy court guards could erase the proof before the Council convened.
Pella rested her elbows on the pine boards and looked from the dormant brass arch of the Courtesy Bridge to the three-column correlation chart pinned beside the Triage Board. Eighteen days had passed since she had stood trembling in the Summoners’ College check hall. Meanwhile, Master Davin Sorell failed her for listening to the pause in a binding call.
