Reeve Dena Holt did not ask Cale what he meant, and she did not waste half a second squinting at Deputy Halven.
She lunged one step across the well platform, caught the left edge of Form Nine-C in her chapped, square-nailed fist beside Cale’s trembling fingers, and stared straight down at the lower margin of the rag parchment.
From two paces back by the wooden trough, Noll Vey watched the pale, metallic shimmer crawl across the paper through the carved eye-sockets of his limestone head. He could feel the distant, rhythmic thrum of Anchor Two pressing up through the slate drains from the Survey House basement—not the hot, chaotic flare of a wild dungeon lie, rather the cold, relentless piston-stroke of an official state register backed by royal charters, tax rolls, and fifty years of habit. Already Deputy Halven’s signature at the bottom was gone save for the top loop of the H, and on line ten, Davin Reed, parish of West Mill was thinning like frost on a sunny windowsill.
“Great God in the hills,” Reeve Holt breathed. Her thumb rubbed once across the vanishing loop of the H, feeling the smooth, unindented paper where the nib-scratch itself was being ironed flat by the distant core.
