The courtyard of the public bathhouse smelled of wet lime, warm sulfur springs, and boiled bone broth.
Iven slid down the copper drainpipe from the bathhouse roof, her scout boots hitting the wet flagstones with a soft, supple slap. Her leather jerkin was spattered with roof-grit and rain, but her breath was steady, her mind sharp with the cold focus of a tracker who had led her pack through an ambush.
Before her stood the wide, vaulted timber doors of the public baths, reinforced with six-inch cured oak baulks and warded with the municipal bone seal of Harth.
Standing on the raised flagstones of the entrance portico was Lady Signe Lorr. The imperial magistrate had set up a heavy oak clerk’s desk in the dry alcove beneath the tiled eaves. On the table lay the open municipal intake ledger, its broad calfskin pages ruled in tidy black columns, beside an iron inkpot and three freshly sharpened goose-quill pens. At Signe’s side stood Captain Dain’s deputy, Sergeant Karr, watching the alley mouth with his broadsword unbuckled and resting across his knees.
To the left, under the steam-vent canopy where the warm overflow from the thermal baths bubbled into the stone gutter, Elin Hale had established her triage station.
