Eren Tal leaned over the gold-trimmed thick parchment, his heavy, scarred hands resting flat on the gold-leaf borders. He looked at the drawing, squinted at the neat academy calligraphy. Then let out a short, harsh bark of laughter that echoed through the marble pavilion.
‘When was this survey made, Master Sorell?’ Eren asked, his voice rough as an iron rasp.
‘It’s based on the authoritative town survey of the First Circle,’ Sorell replied stiffly.
‘The survey from twelve years ago,’ Eren snapped back. He tapped the golden quarry basin with a grease-stained thumb. ‘Ten years ago, the Town Board leased the floor of that quarry to forty artisan workshops. Right now, in that ‘unoccupied sump,’ there are twelve lime kilns, six cooperage sheds, three animal fat rendering houses, and three hundred working-class families living in timber cottages built against the stone face.’
Sorell waved his hand with shrugging contempt. ‘Those tenants are secret squatters holding informal trade permits. They have no legal standing against a royal defense installation. If the emergency bypass vents, they must evacuate to the upper road.’
Pella Rook stepped forward, her voice cutting through the pavilion with chilling clarity. ‘You plan to dump twelve thousand cubic feet of boiling river mud into an inhabited basin with four hundred feet of head? That water will hit those timber cottages like an avalanche of wet lead! You would drown three hundred people in five minutes and call it an emergency bypass!’
