The lower registry vault of the Mere Survey House smelled of iron gall ink, cold tallow, and thirty years of damp wool coats.
Cale stood in the narrow aisle between the tax-default racks and Lord Auditor Orin Vane’s restricted black-iron cabinet, holding a brass tallow lamp in his left hand while his right thumb rubbed the smooth bone handle of his penknife. Upstairs, above the vaulted brick ceiling, the eight-o’clock morning bell had just finished tolling. Senior Clerk Bren was in the front counting-room arguing with a drover over sheep-dip tariffs, and Lord Auditor Vane’s personal guards were quartered across the lane at the coaching inn.
“A routine audit of the closed shaft vouchers,” Cale whispered to the iron door, because speaking the rule aloud made his lungs feel less as if they were full of cold river water. “Section Four of the Junior Clerks’ Manual permits cross-inspection of archived payrolls whenever an indemnity dispute arises.”
His mother used to laugh at him when he talked like that at their kitchen table. After his father died in the timber weir during the high spring flood twelve years ago, eleven-year-old Cale had spent six months reading every borrowed statute book in the parish, convinced that if he only learned the exact proper words and filed the right blue form at the Survey House window, the clerks would find his father’s missing seven-year service tally and restore his mother’s widow pension.
