By a quarter past ten on the twenty-fifth night, the rain beat hard and steady against the high window row windows of Sister Merrow’s washroom. She was driven by the warm southwestern gale that was already eating away the mountain snowpack forty miles upstream. Inside the back kitchen, the nightly lock-down was complete. Tavi was asleep on his cot in the dry pantry behind the flour bins, Examiner Corvin Hest had gone back up the hill to keep quiet watch over the junior apprentices in the College dormitories. Sister Merrow had banked the kitchen coal fires under a thick blanket of damp ash.
Only Pella Rook and Foreman Eren Tal remained awake beside the scrubbed pine bread table, finishing the final clockwork check of the re-mounted Courtesy Arch before turning in.
Eren knelt on the flat stone slabs with his brass feeler-gauges and a small horn oil-can, checking each of the four iron floor-studs and wiping a thin film of boiled linseed oil over the two shallow tooth-scars left on the upper brass casing by Master Sorell’s draining clamp.
“When I first dragged this brass frame out of Sub-Vault Four-B twenty-five days ago, Eren,” Pella said quietly, holding the shuttered bull’s-eye lantern so its warm yellow beam lit up the three-inch Courtesy gap at the crown of the arch, “I thought the doorway itself was the miracle. When Judge Vane’s court guards carried it out the alley door yesterday evening and left that empty rectangle on the stones, part of…
