Before the fourth bell of the afternoon had finished echoing from St. Jude’s stone belfry, Notary Corve Penner returned from the vaulted strongroom of the Merchant Assize carrying a blank royal-folio register wrapped in oiled goatskin.
It took both of Penner’s ink-stained hands to set the volume flat upon the River Lantern’s main taproom trestle table. Bound in quarter-inch oak boards covered with undyed pigskin and reinforced at the corners with riveted brass shoes, the register contained three hundred leaves of heavy linen-rag vellum sewn onto seven raised double-cords of waxed hemp. It was the kind of book built by guild stationers to survive a century of warehouse damp, tax audits, and river floods.
Jon Hale stood at the center of the trestle, wiping the oak tabletop bone-dry with a clean bar-cloth before Penner unwrapped the goatskin cover. Beside Jon stood Elin with her bakery tally-slates and household ration books stacked to her elbow, while Lady Signe Lorr placed her brass inkstand, sand-shaker, and straight-edge rule at the head of the board.
“Why can we not simply bind the new census sheets into the back of your preserved inn register, Master Hale?” Corve Penner asked, polishing his brass spectacles on his sleeve as he looked toward the smaller leather-bound commercial ledger (#7) resting beside Jon’s left hand—the book that still held the pitch-stained thumbprint of erased cooper Ben Rill. “If that register already survives the sixth-bell rollback under your Keeper’s bailment, surely any page stitched into its spine would ride…
