By midnight, the Courtesy Workshop’s levee bench had been transformed into an open-air chemical testing lab. Under the yellow glare of four hooded hurricane lanterns, Imran Bell and Apprentice Kel Dorr sat side by side on a hemlock worktable. It was surrounded by glass test tubes, brass alcohol burners, and white fine china evaporating dishes.
Across the table, Corvin was carefully slicing core samples of gray river silt taken from the mud basin with a sharpened brass spatula. The settled mud was laid out in neat, numbered rows on sheets of clean white parchment, each layer revealing the exact chronological settling of the morning’s flood.
The air was filled with a sharp, healing cocktail of odors: the pungent sting of boiling acetic acid, the skin-burning reek of pipe lime, the oily scent of burning animal fat, and the distinctive rotten-egg stench of sulfur salts precipitating out of solution. The damp river breeze coming off the basin carried the cool, clean smell of wet stonework and night water, providing a refreshing relief from the fumes.
‘Look at layer four on sample seven, Pella,’ Imran said. She held a glass vial up to the lantern light. In the clear solution, a brilliant, turquoise-blue precipitate was settling to the bottom in dense, powdery flakes. ‘That is copper green rust in high concentration. Over eighty parts per million. Natural river silt from the upper Gray Rush contains less than two parts per million of dissolved copper.’
