The Old Intake Gatehouse stood at the narrowest neck of the gorge where the Gray Rush entered Lathmere, its heavy cut stone walls stained dark green to the twelve-foot mark by fifty winters of river spray. For the past five years under Davin Sorell’s administration, the oak door of the gatehouse had carried a brass-framed parchment schedule known among the river trades as the Tithing Board. That schedule had needed every carpenter, mason, and ditch-digger in Lowbank to contribute four unpaid “civic corvée days” each quarter to scrape hard pipe-crust from the Hollow Crown’s intake grates—working twelve-hour shifts in waist-deep, sulfur-chilled water with no boots provided and a fine of two silver coins for any man who left the trench before the academy judge rang dismissal.
At half past four in the afternoon, the brass frame and its mildewed parchment lay in two pieces at the bottom of the rubble barrow.
Foreman Eren Tal stood on a low three-legged stool before the massive oak planks of the gatehouse door. His left shoulder was still bound tightly in Sister Merrow’s clean linen bandages beneath his leather waistcoat, stiff from the timber-bracing surge two days earlier. So he held the heavy iron framing hammer in his right hand. Meanwhile, Korr Var, the master stonemason, steadied a broad, planed board of seasoned sweet chestnut against the wood.
