Four animal fat candles burned inside cut-down tin cans. Their yellow flames flickered in the rotten-egg draft that blew through the third crucible crypt.
Ren Vale knelt on an overturned wooden nail-keg, his lambskin apron stiff with dried sludge. His mammoth bone awl was held between thumb and forefinger. Spread across three joined anvil-blocks were dozens of scavenged parchment rolls, grease-stained lease agreements. The thick parchment tracing he had made from the master charter in Vault Three. The smell of bitter gall-nut ink, hot animal glue, and drying sheepskin rose from the metal surface, competing with the damp stench of the crypt.
To his right, Vane Vale stood with his velvet coat draped over his shoulders like a clerk’s mantle, his gold-trimmed brass pocket counting frame clicking with terrifying, uninterrupted speed.
Click-clack-click. Click-clack.
“Item forty-four,” Vane recited, his sharp grey eyes darting between three separate property deeds. “The East Chimney pipe concession of 244. Leased to the High Spire Mining Trade group for an annual tribute of eight hundred silver groschen. But observe the counter-signed name in the margin, boy! The notary who stamped the renewal was using the third seal of Magistrate Kroll. A man who had been dead of lung rot for seven weeks before the document was registered! It’s an overt, systemic falsification! A legal fraud of royal proportions!”
