The lower cloister arcade offered scant shelter from the driving rain. But Corvin Hest had made do with worse during thirty years of town auditing. He sat behind a rough deal frame stand table scavenged from the academy back kitchen, his heavy woolen overcoat buttoned high against the damp cellar draft that swept between the unglazed stone pillars.
Before him sat a clay pot jar of black dark oak-ink, a brass balance scale. A shallow wooden tray lined with clean dry linen. Outside in the courtyard, the rain pattered against the slate roof edges, washing streaks of coal soot down the ancient stonework. One by one, seven young men and women in the gray wool tunics of third-year academy scribes stepped forward. Their breath rising in was pale plumes into the raw, cold air.
“Set your ink-horn on the tray, Joram,” Corvin said, his voice level and devoid of dramatic scolding. “Then deposit your signet.”
Joram unbuckled the brass chain from his leather belt with fingers that were stiff with cold. The brass metal tube of his academy scribe’s seal—the tool with which he had stamped hundreds of compulsory spirit-labor warrants over three long, exhausting years—clicked softly as it landed on the linen cloth.
