The air in the western undercroft of the Summoners’ College tasted of damp river limestone, rotting straw, and cold vinegar ink. It was a bitter-salt, cellar smell that Pella Rook knew down to her collarbones. For five years she had hauled ash buckets down these very steps, scrubbing the flat stone slabs until her fingernails split and the soles of her cart driver boots grew slick with animal fat. Back then, the archive had been forbidden ground, guarded by oak doors bound in double-forged brass straps and an iron padlock that smelled of stale mutton lard. Today, the padlock hung open from an iron staple, its metal tube seized by rusting and coal soot.
Kel Dorr held the horn lantern high, its animal fat flame fluttering whenever the draft pulled through the foundation cry-holes. The yellow light picked out three tiers of rough-sawn pine shelving bolted directly into the sweating stonework. The lowest two shelves held cracked slates and bound bundles of parchment stiffened into brittle wafers by years of cellar damp. The third shelf, set at chest height where the rising river moisture had not yet rotted the pine grain, held an orderly line of notched iron rails. From those rails hung forty-seven stamped tokens. Some were thin disks of raw blistered copper, hammered flat by apprentice smiths in the academy foundry. Others were square plaques of heavy gray lead. It was stamped with the numeral of an intake water gate or the angular rune of a carrier water…
