When Davin Sorell rose to speak, the murmur in the gallery died down to the scrape of boot leather against marble and the dry rustle of parchment.
He didn’t step to the clerk’s table. He stood within the wooden respondent’s dock, his tall, spare frame casting a long shadow across the white flags in the midday sun. His un-dyed wool tunic hung loose on his shoulders. His hair, iron-gray and uncombed, clung to his temples with cold sweat. Yet his chin was raised. His pale eyes swept the assembly with the cold, unbending pride of a man who believed he had out-thought everyone in the room.
“You speak of snapped collars,” Sorell began, his voice dry, quiet, and ringing in the marble bowl of the chamber. “You speak of zinc air holes in bronze castings, of four inches of cracked clay pipe under a washerwoman’s cabbage cellar, of a plumber from another world who scalded her forearm on a hot-water vent.”
He turned his head slowly, looking directly at Councilor Vesk.
“Fourteen years ago,” Sorell said, “I stood upon the eastern weir of the Gray Rush during the Great Flood. I was thirty-two years old. I held the silver wand of an apprentice land-mapper. My sister, Mara Sorell, was twenty-six. She was stationed at the intake gates of the second terrace with twenty-two town ferry workers and timber men.”
