By five-thirty in the morning, the water in the lower hall of Sub-Cellar 4-B had risen to six inches, swirling brown and cold around the shins of Pella Rook’s cart driver boots. The surface of the pool was covered with a slick, rainbow-bright film of coal soot and rotting straw. It carried floating chips of pine shavings and empty animal fat containers that bumped against the stone walls with hollow, rhythmic clunks.
Pella stood in the doorway of Archive Vault Two, holding a horn lantern high. Beside her, Kel Dorr stood waist-deep in water at the back of the chamber, wildly hauling heavy bundles of parchment from the lowest pine shelves and stacking them onto a dry wooden handcart.
“Leave the duplicate rolls, Kel!” Pella called out, her voice cutting through the hollow roar of water rushing through the floor drains. “Take only the main audit slates and the brass gauge boxes!”
Kel paused, his waterlogged woolen mittens clutching a massive leather-bound folio stamped with the gold-trimmed crest of the Summoners’ Guild: College Intake Ledger: Volume XLIV (Drainage Warrants 1840–1860).
“Pella, these are the original land-mapper certificates for the western floodwall,” Kel pleaded, his teeth chattering from the cold. “If these dissolve, the city will have no legal proof of where the town easements run!”
