Master Orv was a broad, wheezing man who wore three heavy wool coats indoors to hide his gout and smelled always of mutton fat and sour small-beer. He sat in the low-ceilinged front parlor of the Nine Lanterns boarding house, his swollen feet propped on a straw-filled hassock, while behind him forty tenants crowded the narrow hallway, their damp boots dripping river slush onto the greasy floorboards.
Outside, the winter rain fell with a persistent, greasy drizzle across Lowbank. That turned the gutters into yellow torrents of coal soot and mud. The boarding house sat at the lowest bend of Fish Street. There, the ancient foundation piers had been sunk into the river silt two hundred years earlier. The walls were covered in dark green mildew. Every threshold was rimed with chalky white crusts of pipe lime.
Pella Rook stood in the doorway with her oilcloth coat dripping onto the doormat. She held her leather-bound drafting board and a case of chalk sticks. Beside her, Eren Tal leaned casually against the doorframe, his heavy ash pry bar resting across his shoulder like a woodcutter’s axe. Tavi hovered behind them on the porch. He grabbed a tin can of hot boiled tea that Sister Merrow had pressed into his hands before they left the kitchen.
The parlor smelled intensely of wet stonework, damp wool, and stale pipe smoke. On the corner table, next to an unwashed pewter mug and a crust of dry bread, lay Orv’s town tax receipt stamped in faded dark oak-ink. The document showed that the building had been assessed for water drainage three times in the last twenty years, each check signed off by a junior clerk who had never bothered to climb down into the dark vaults below.
‘I didn’t send for a carpenter and a girl with an empty satchel,’ Master Orv barked. He waved a fat, grease-stained thumb at Pella. ‘I sent a boy with four copper pennies to the High Terrace to fetch a real summoner from the College. A man with a stitched velvet mantle who can wave a bronze wand and banish whatever water imp is spewing bile into my coal bunker.’
‘The College summoners don’t walk down to Fish Street for four coppers, Master Orv,’ Pella said evenly. That kept her voice as level as a spirit level. ‘Their carriage fee alone is two gold sovereigns, payable before the horses are hitched. And if Master Sorell’s apprentices came, they would bring brimstone pellets, poison your well, condemn your building, and evict your tenants by nightfall.’
A murmur of bitter agreement rippled through the tenants crowded in the passage. Two washerwomen in frayed shawls nodded vigorously. Their basement wash-tubs had been underwater since dawn, ruining thirty shirts belonging to the wagon drivers’ guild.
‘I have sixty tenants paying weekly rent on these rooms,’ Orv growled, shifting his swollen knee with a wince of genuine pain. ‘If the coal bin floods, the kitchen stove goes cold. If the stove goes cold, the draymen move their beds to the Red Anchor, and my rent ledger is ruined. I need a spell that dries the stones, girl. A proper magical seal.’
‘Water doesn’t obey magical spells, Master Orv,’ Pella replied. She stepped two paces into the parlor and unbuckled the strap of her drafting satchel. ‘Water obeys slope, volume, and air pressure. Your cellar is not infested with water imps. It’s experiencing backing-up pressure from the town relief line.’
Orv let out a wet, rattling scoff that sprayed beer foam onto his lapels. ‘Backing-up pressure? You sound like an apprentice clerk reciting rules from an old textbook. My grandfather built this boarding house on dry gravel ballast forty years ago. The river has never touched that cellar floor in all that time.’
‘Your grandfather built it. Just then, the Great Sluice was vented through the old ferry water chute,’ Eren said from the doorway, his gravelly voice cutting through the landlord’s bluster. ‘Your gravel ballast is sitting directly above the 1842 bypass throat. For forty years, the excess head drained freely into the harbor. Now the College has plugged the throat with granite to feed their high-pressure drain tube. The head has nowhere left to go except through your floor.’
Orv turned red, the veins in his fat neck pulsing against his soiled neckcloth. ‘Bosh. High-born nonsense. You’re Hal Rook’s daughter, aren’t you? The one running an unlicensed kitchen workshop out of Merrow’s washhouse. The town beadle told the market women you were conjuring demons through a brass ring.’
‘We don’t conjure demons,’ Pella said calmly. ‘We clear blocked valves, reinforce sagging lintels, and monitor high-pressure friction. We charge silver coin for honest labor, and we leave dry floors behind us. If you want a college ritual, you may wait in your chair until your coal floats out the window. If you want your cellar drained today, we go down the steps now.’
She pulled a pair of heavy grease pencils from her leather sheath—one yellow, one dark indigo—and laid them on the corner of the landlord’s table. ‘We charge two silver coins for the first survey. That gives you a sound tap of the main sewer line, a heat reading of the foundation joints. A approved diagram of the blockage.’
Orv stared at the colored grease pencils as though they were poisonous adders. ‘Two silver coins for looking at mud? Two silver coins could buy a side of salted beef or forty loaves of barley bread! You’re taking advantage of an honest citizen during a civic disaster!’
‘An honest citizen who hasn’t cleared his basement drain since the last coronation,’ Eren remarked dryly. He tapped the doorpost with his ash bar. ‘Every barrel of coal dust your fire man dumped down the cellar grating over the last ten years is sitting behind your non-return valve like set Roman cement.’
Orv opened his mouth to deliver another furious retort. But before the words could leave his lips, a muffled, violent thud rang through the floor timbers beneath their feet. It was a heavy, high-pressure slam—the sound of hundreds of gallons of water striking a dead-end blocked path—followed by a high-pitched whistling shriek that made the windowpanes rattle in their lead frames.
From the basement stairwell at the end of the hall, a thick, white cloud of rotten-egg steam billowed into the hall. The air suddenly carried the pungent silt stench of deep river muck mixed with boiling stone salt water and copper green rust.
A tenant screamed. Two men in the passage stumbled backward onto the porch. Down the narrow cellar stairs, a warm, yellow-gray foam began creeping upward over the bottom treads, bubbling and frothing like fermenting beer.
Pella didn’t run. She stepped past the scared tenants, pulled a grease pencil from her pocket. Then she knelt on the landing at the top of the cellar steps. She watched the bubbles rise, noting their size, the speed of the steam vents, and the distinct sulfuric iridescence coating the surface of the suds.
The heat rising from the stairwell was staggering. It carried the exact bitter-salt bite of the steam Pella had felt behind the breached larder wall in Sister Merrow’s washroom. It coated her eyelashes with tiny droplets of condensed stone moisture that tasted bitterly of copper green rust and hardened lime.
‘That foam is ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit,’ Pella observed aloud, jotting the number in her pocketbook. ‘It’s dissolving the lime mortar between your bottom three foundation courses, Master Orv. In two hours, your chimney breast will begin to lean.’
Master Orv’s jaw hung loose. The color drained from his jowls until he looked like a mound of cold bread dough. He scrambled up from his chair. He grabbed his walking stick with white knuckles, staring in horror at the rising steam.
‘What... What is that?’ Orv stammered, his arrogance evaporating like spit on a hot griddle. ‘What is that filthy stuff?’
‘That is the High Terrace’s waste heat, forced through your floorboards,’ Pella said. She stood up and closed her notebook with a clean snap. ‘And it won’t be banished by a wand.’
Orv reached out a trembling hand, catching the sleeve of Eren’s coat. ‘Tal... Eren Tal. You’re a sensible craftsman. You’ve repaired drays for my brother. Tell her to stop it. I’ll pay. What is the fee? Two copper pennies? Three?’
Eren looked down at the landlord’s clutching hand, his weather-beaten face impassive as river granite. ‘Copper pays for soup, Master Orv. A commercial high-pressure drainage check in boiling foam needs specialized labor, approved tooling. A signed town indemnity contract.’
‘How much?’ Orv gasped, coughing as a draft of sulfur vapor reached his nostrils.
‘We price it in the yard,’ Eren said, turning toward the door. ‘Come along, Pella. Let Master Orv watch his coal dissolve while we write up the bill.’