The fourth inkwell on the drying shelf didn’t shatter until the city’s third defensive castle wall gave way.
It was an earthen pot filled with iron-gall mid-air. Crushed oak apples steeped in sour ale, boiled with green burning acid. Then he steadied with a thimble of gum arabic. The blast wave passed through thirty feet of bedrock and punched through the flat stone slabs beneath the workbench. Then, the pot hopped once on its pine trivet, tipped against the leather stropping strap. Then he emptied two gills of dark violet liquid across a forty-year-old town high-pressure lease.
Ren Vale caught the edge of the parchment before the stain reached the seal.
His thumbs moved with the unthinking speed of a man who had spent seven years scraping mold off legal thick parchment in stuffy basements. With his left hand, he scattered a handful of dry pounce—powdered cuttlefish bone and chalk—across the expanding puddle. With his right, he brought down the silver metal ring of his mammoth-ivory awl. He pressed the hardened ivory flat against the thick parchment’s grain to form a physical dam along the margin.
“Ren,” Mira said from the hearth. “The ceiling is dropping mortar into the porridge.”
