Once Prit’s nine white tally strokes stood in a neat line across the bottom of the hall slate, the mood around the trestle table shifted from parliamentary debate to the brisk, quiet clatter of a workshop before market day.
Noll Vey watched them divide the labor, and for a fellow who had spent half a century believing that the only way out of a tight corner was a fast tongue and a distracted constable, the sheer stubbornness of their method was a marvel to behold. Nobody asked him to conjure a winged horse or a tunnel to the sea. Nobody asked for fairy gold. They treated Lord Auditor Orin Vane’s encroaching net as a bad roof in a rainstorm—something you beat with dry buckets, good nails, and three copies of the receipt.
At the far end of the bench, Cale pulled his portable brass inkstand closer to the tallow dip, laid out four sheets of heavy unbleached rag paper that had never touched the Survey House’s stamped stock, and began copying his sworn witness deposition for the third time. His round shoulders were hunched, and his tongue poked out slightly at the corner of his mouth as he wrote out the exact dates of the sealed-shaft payrolls, the blue-stone transport permits, and the six-week-old voucher hiring the debt collector Varn to drop Noll Vey onto a prepared core seal.
