The tallow candle burned with a soft, sputtery hiss inside the pierced-tin lantern, casting circular spots of amber light across the grain of the small pine desk. Jon Hale sat in the narrow nook beneath the taproom stair, a forgotten corner of the River Lantern that had once served as his father’s ledger closet. The space was barely four paces wide, smelling of dried elderberries, old wool blankets, and the dry, sweet scent of seasoned cedar shavings. On the wall above his head hung three iron keys on a split brass ring—the cellar keys of his grandfather’s time, long since rendered useless by new padlocks, but preserved out of habit.
Before him on the desk lay the unrolled vellum taken from Dunstan Harl’s rye loaf.
Jon weighted the curled corners of the calfskin with a lead paperweight, an empty salt cellar, a bone-handled stylus, and his own horn paring knife. The parchment was thin, translucent when held toward the flame, and ruled with faint red ink lines characteristic of the Imperial Bureau of Works. This was not a rough field sketch drawn in haste over a horse’s saddle; it was a formal military engineering assessment, executed with the cold, mathematical dispassion of the Capital’s high artillery academies.
