While Dima Fen stitched the offering sleeves in Lowbank and the Harrowby specialists worked their afternoon routes in Yorkshire, twenty-eight-year-old Examiner Corvin Hest walked across the rain-swept granite quadrangle of the Summoners’ College on the Upper Terraces. Under the terms of the temporary protective warrant Master Davin Sorell had got from the High court sub-committee the last evening, the fourteen unbolted bronze members of the Courtesy Arch were legally placed in Neutral Witnessed Custody inside Relic Store Vault Two pending the conclusion of the flood emergency.
Because Corvin Hest still held his senior judge’s key-ring and had been named on Councilman Elna Vesk’s earlier town writ as an official technical witness for the relic’s condition, he had every lawful right to enter Vault Two at two bells in the afternoon and verify that the taken away pieces remained untouched inside their sealed oak crates.
He dropped the broad white marble steps beneath the Hall of Instruments. There, the air smelled of dry cedar shavings, beeswax floor polish. The sharp ozone tang of charged bronze binding-rings. At the iron grille of Vault Two sat Junior Store-Clerk Mallow’s cousin, Custodian Venn, reading a ledger beside a fire bowl of smokeless char.
“Afternoon, Custodian Venn,” Corvin said in his crispest academic tone, signing his name and license number in the vault gate-book. “I’m here to record the afternoon custody proof on Docket Seventy-Three—the fourteen brass threshold members brought up from Lowbank last evening.”
