At the second bell past midnight, Senior Examiner Varo Nenn walked into Sister Merrow’s washroom, his silk hood soaked through with rain, his face gray as a wet slate. He didn’t look at the copper kettles or the heaps of damp linen piled in the wicker baskets. He walked directly to the pine work table where Pella and Korr Var were examining Hal Rook’s service maps. He pulled a thick sheaf of folded pipe hub thick parchment from his breast pocket. Then he dropped it onto the wood.
‘I have brought the nonstop heat ledger,’ Varo Nenn said, his voice flat, exhausted, and devoid of the academy pomp he had displayed in the Senate Chamber. ‘I took it from the locked cabinet in Master Sorell’s private study. Meanwhile, he was dining with the patricians on the First Terrace. It contains the raw hourly readings from the spirit chamber for the past fourteen days.’
Korr Var looked at the older scholar, his gray eyebrows rising slightly. ‘You understand what this means, Varo? If Sorell discovers you opened that cabinet, he will charge you with high sacrilege against the Collegiate Seal.’
‘Let him charge me,’ Nenn said, sinking onto a low wooden bench and resting his trembling hands on his knees. ‘I spent forty years cataloging the sacred spirits of the river. I know their names, their temperaments, and their songs. A spirit of the third order can’t survive in water above twenty-two degrees. Senn has been running in water at forty-four…
