The wheelwright yard of Tal & Sons occupied a wedge of damp ground between the high stone embankment of the Lowbank ferry boat ramp and the leaning rear timber galleries of Fish Street. It smelled of freshly cleft ash, rancid sheep fat. The bitter, acidic tang of forge melted rock waste cooled in canal water.
Eren Tal stood beside his heavy beechwood shaving horse, an iron-bound measuring traveler in his left hand and a piece of soft red chalk in his right. Spread across the rough bench was an oblong cedar board, blackened with old grease and scarred with saw cuts, upon which he had recorded the workshop’s daily disbursements in neat, cramped columns.
“Item,” Eren said aloud, tapping the board with his chalk. “Three six-inch hand-forged timber spikes. Stamped with the wheelwright’s mark, fourth heat from the charcoal bin. Value: two copper bits.”
Pella, who was sitting on an overturned nail keg trying to untangle a hank of tarred hemp line with her needle-point arrow, didn’t look up.
“Those spikes are holding Merrow’s washroom shelf,” she said, her voice muffled by the collar of her worn apprentice tunic. “The shelf that holds Ada’s tool tote so it doesn’t sit in the puddle. That’s workshop public works, Eren. It isn’t a private loan.”
“Item,” Eren continued, his voice perfectly level, fully calm by her explanation. “One pint of cold-pressed linseed oil, drawn from the carriage-varnish cask. Used by Pella Rook to soak the hinges of the back kitchen door because she said the squeak was interfering with her listening calls. Value: three copper bits.”
“The door was screeching like an ungreased axle,” Pella muttered. She pulled a tight knot free with a sharp tug. “You couldn’t hear the arch’s gear catch click.”
“The door has screeched since my grandfather was a boy,” Eren said. He didn’t look angry. He looked like an accountant who had discovered an apprentice using sheepskin receipts for kindling. “It screeched through three floods and two town audits. If the door now swings like a gentleman’s drawing-room cabinet, the expense belongs to the Courtesy Bridge. That brings your running ledger to six silver coins and four copper bits.”
He turned the chalk flat, drawing a thick red rule beneath the total.
“I don’t have six silver coins,” Pella said, setting the hemp line across her knees. Her boots were caked with the gray, sticky river clay that seeped into Lowbank every time the High Tor water gates opened upstream. “I have two copper bits and a bruised thumb from filing that iron billet.”
“Then you’re running in the red, Master Summoner,” Eren said. He picked up an ash felloe—a curved segment of a heavy wagon rim—and began shaving the inner radius with his two-handled drawknife. The curls of pale wood peeled away with a clean, rhythmic stroke. It fell around his boots like ribbons of dried parchment. “And a workshop that operates in the red while promising to save the neighborhood from a flood isn’t a building project. It’s a performance.”
“I’m not performing,” Pella said, her face tightening.
“You’re giving away your time and borrowing my timber,” Eren replied, not slowing the stroke of his blade. “When the college students come down to the landing with their silk sashes and their silver trumpets, they break our fences, trample the draymen’s cabbage plots, summon three bushels of mud to show off their water-mastery. Then walk back up to the High Terraces with their noses in the air. If someone complains, they call it the price of the arcane art.”
He stopped the drawknife. He set the tool down on the shaving horse and reached for a flat slate touchstone on his bench shelf.
“Give me those two copper bits you’ve got in your apron,” he commanded.
Pella reached into her pocket and handed him the thin, worn coins. Eren scratched them firmly across the matte black surface of the touchstone, leaving two pale, coppery streaks. He took a small bottle of strong etching acid, dipped a glass rod. Then he touched the acid to the metal marks. The streaks bubbled green, dissolved cleanly, and left behind no gray lead shadow.
“Good copper,” Eren admitted, handing them back. “Not lead-cored. At least you aren’t carrying counterfeit ferry change. But good copper doesn’t pay for ash balks.”
He leaned forward, his calloused palms resting on the pale wood of the felloe.
“My father lost two teams of draft horses during the Great Flood fourteen years ago,” Eren said. His voice dropped into that low, flat Lowbank register that carried more weight than a court guard’s gavel. “Not because the river was too big. The river has always been big. He lost them because the college summoners took every ash balk in Lowbank to build their temporary viewing platform so the Archchancellor could watch the water rise without getting his slippers damp. They promised forty crowns in town vouchers. Do you know what those vouchers were worth when the mud settled?”
“Nothing,” Pella said quietly. She knew the story. Hal Rook had told it to her three weeks before he drowned at the third gate.
“They were worth four bits on the crown at the court guard’s office,” Eren said. “And the wagon drivers had to carry their freight on their own backs for two years while we cut fresh timber from the High Tor slopes. If we’re going to open that larder wall today, Pella, we do it as a business. We do it with a ledger, we do it with receipts. When we fix a pipe for a shopkeeper or an innkeeper, we charge them the legal rate.”
“You want to charge Master Orv at the Nine Lanterns?” Pella asked, incredulous. “His cellar is knee-deep in sulfur foam. The man is scared his house is going to slide into the canal.”
“Master Orv owns four boarding houses and a brewery warehouse on Fish Street,” Eren said, picking up his chalk again. “He charges six bits a week for a bunk with damp straw and two blankets. If we keep his building from dropping into the river, he can pay seven silver coins for the timber and the check. Or he can hire a college summoner for fifty gold sovereigns to chant over his foundation while the walls split.”
Pella sat on her nail keg, looking at the cedar board.
In her five years at the college, money had been treated as something vulgar. A crude necessity handled by beadles and back kitchen stewards. Meanwhile, the masters discussed eternal harmonies and elemental geometries. But she had failed her third-year binding circle. Then, the college hadn’t offered a philosophical debate. They had handed her an itemized bill for three broken chalk slates, twelve pounds of salt-paste, and four months of unearned porridge. Then locked the gate behind her.
“How much for the oak shores?” she asked, nodding toward two heavy eight-by-eight timbers leaning against the forge wall.
“Two silver coins for the pair,” Eren said. “Including the wedges and the iron dog-irons to pin the heads. I cut them for a brewery heavy cart that didn’t pay its deposit. They’re seasoned heart-oak. They’ll hold Merrow’s ceiling even if the whole upper floor tries to come down.”
“Put it on the slate,” Pella said, standing up. She picked up her needle-point arrow and her measuring tongs, shoving them into the leather pockets of her apron. “And add one silver coin for Ada’s tea and soup.”
Eren picked up a slender steel awl from the rack above his bench and scored a fine, straight line across the face of an ash spoke. He held the spoke close to his ear, tapped the end grain with the wooden handle of his awl. Then he listened to the pitch of the wood.
“Hear that?” he asked Pella, who was watching from the keg.
“It sounds like a dry stick,” she replied.
“It sounds like three years of air seasoning,” Eren corrected. “If you tap green ash, it thuds like cold suet. It absorbs the sound because the sap is still in the pores. When it’s properly seasoned under a drafty shed roof, the wood rings like bell metal. That’s why an ash spoke doesn’t snap. Just then, a timber heavy cart hits a granite curb at five miles an hour. It bends an eighth of an inch, sheds the shock into the hub, and springs back.”
He picked up a flat oilstone and a small tin of animal fat. He spread a smear of fat across the gray slate surface, placed her four-inch cold chisel on the stone. Then he adjusted the angle of his wrists until the edge sat perfectly flush against the grit.
“Watch the edge,” he commanded, moving the steel in steady figure-eights across the stone with a rhythmic, wet shrr-shrr. “You’ve been grinding this chisel like an apprentice trying to open an oyster. The cutting edge is rounded off like a spoon. A cold chisel for river limestone needs a clean twenty-degree wedge. Too steep, and it bounces off the stone like a wooden peg. Too thin, and the edge chips the first time you hit a flint pebble in the mortar.”
Pella watched the dark gray paste of steel specks and animal fat gather around the edges of the blade.
“I used it to scrape salt-paste off the summoning flags,” she admitted.
“Then you were abusing the steel,” Eren said, not breaking his rhythm. “A chisel is a cutting edge, not an iron broom. You treat your tools like garbage. When you need them to hold an edge against forty pounds of high-pressure stone, they’ll shatter in your face and leave you with a split palm.”
He wiped the blade on his leather apron, inspected the hair-thin line of polished metal along the cutting tip. Then he handed the chisel back to her.
“Take this touchstone,” he added. He pointed to a flat bar of black Lydian jasper on his bench. “When you get paid in copper bits from the wagon drivers, you rub the rim across the stone. If the streak is reddish-orange and clears under vinegar, it’s dock copper. If it leaves a dull, greasy gray streak that doesn’t clear, it’s lead poured in a plaster mold by the coin-sweepers behind the fish market. We don’t take lead fakes in this workshop, Pella. We take currency that buys iron.”
“Ada pays for her own tea,” Eren remarked, though a faint, dry twitch of amusement touched the corner of his mouth. “She brought a padded steel bottle from Harrowby that holds heat like a charcoal fire bowl. If you try to charge her for Merrow’s cabbage water, she’ll probably hit you with that eighteen-inch wrench.”
“She would,” Pella admitted, turning toward the yard gate. “Get your hand-cart, Eren. The lunch bell is in twenty minutes. If we aren’t through that mortar before she steps across, she’ll spend her whole break telling us how to swing a sledge.”