The dry room behind Sister Merrow’s trauma medicine room smelled of dried lavender, carbolic vinegar, and the clean, oily scent of sewing machine lubricant. It was the only room in Lower Lowbank built entirely upon a natural sandstone outcrop that rose four feet above the maximum flood mark of the Great Sluice.
Sister Merrow sat behind a scrubbed deal table, an iron-gall inkpot balanced in a lead ring to keep it from tipping as the shakes of the river rumbled through the floor. She dipped a worn steel nib into the black ink and wrote with a steady, uncompromising hand across the heavy thick parchment pages of the Lowbank Parish Ledger.
“Entry fourteen,” Merrow spoke aloud, her voice dry and precise. “Torren Vale, master joiner of Fish Street. Sixteen hand planes, four backsaws, two sets of forged wood slot chisels, one brass-inlaid ebony edge gauge. Inspected, wrapped in oiled sacking, sealed in Iron Chest Seven under parish wax.”
Beside her, Senior Auditor Varo Nenn pressed his heavy brass town seal into the warm red animal fat pool on the lid of Chest Seven. The seal bore the three open water gate gates of the ancient city charter—the old emblem that Master Sorell had tried to replace with his single Crown.
