The heavy oak door of the western undercroft creaked on its rusted hinges as the autumn river wind pulled through the foundation cry-holes. The cellar smelled of damp limestone, rotting straw, and cold vinegar ink. An bitter-salt, underground tang that Pella Rook knew down to her collarbones. For five long years she had carried 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. Today, the wild footfalls of Master Sorell’s beadles had finally faded from the cloister above. That left behind only the steady, cavernous dripping of water drops from the barrel-vaulted ceiling.
Kel Dorr held the animal fat lantern steady. Even so, the boy’s knuckles were dark with river grime and shaking from the raw eight-degree chill. Before them on the third pine shelf, thirty-eight of the forty-seven iron pegs were now bare. The blistered copper tags and lead tallies that had bound minor river spirits to academy lime kilns, gravel trenches, and mortar troughs were neatly stacked in Corvin Hest’s pine crate, inert as cold river gravel.
Only nine remained.
Those nine plaques were not thin copper discs or soft lead tallies. They were forged of dense gray iron, three times the thickness of the backup tokens, their surfaces stamped with the personal linked rune of Master Davin Sorell. They didn’t dangle loosely in the cellar draft. They hung rigid, suspended from braided copper wire that hummed with a…
