Ossa Flint did not walk like a clerk. She walked like a smith who spent forty years carrying pig-iron between the furnace and the quenching trough, her heavy work boots striking the limestone flags with an uneven, grinding cadence. The iron disk over her left eye socket was cold and black, fastened with greasy calfskin thongs that cut into the silver-grey hair above her temples.
She stopped at the central stone table, tossed the black horsehair braid to the floor, and shook out the oiled sheepskin roll.
The parchment was four feet long, yellowed at the edges with coal smoke and damp cellar air. It uncurled across the table with a stiff, crackling rattle. At the top of the sheet, drawn in dense copper-brown draftman’s ink, were three concentric mechanical diagrams showing the cross-section of an oath-silver compulsion collar. Beside the drawings ran thirty lines of engineering notes in a small, cramped hand, every margin stamped with the red wax impression of the Morren armory.
Behind the clerk’s rail, Cale leaned forward over his folios, his wire-rimmed spectacles catching the pale morning light. He recognized the draft numbering before Ossa even cleared her throat.
“Registry series seventy-one,” Cale murmured to Master Serit, his pen tracing an entry in his Survey House ledger. “The master armory log from the year of the second levy. The file was marked lost in transit during the spring river floods.”
