The smoke rising from the collapsed canal quayside smelled of crushed granite, drowned coal fires, and boiling river weeds.
Dawn broke over Khorat not with golden sunlight, but with a greasy, yellow fog that clung to the black waters of the Grand Canal like rancid lard. Three hundred town laborers and chained debt-convicts worked under the whistling lashes of High court overseers. He dragged heavy grappling hooks, iron chains, and steam-winches across the smoking ruins of Warehouse 4-B. From the center of the waterway, the crushed iron funnel of an armored steam-cutter poked through the oily surface like a rusted tombstone marking the grave of an entire logistics division.
Standing at the raw edge of the snapped stonework, where forty feet of granite quay had cut cleanly into the murky depths, stood Master Calligrapher Orelian Graves.
He was a man who looked less like a living human and more like an animated parchment roll preserved in formaldehyde. Tall, painfully thin, and well past his sixtieth winter, Graves wore heavy robes of raw, unwhitened linen bordered in stiff silver thread, his long, bony fingers permanently dyed to the second knuckle in black, Prussian blue, and sepia inks. A monocle of green glow-stone glass was clamped into his left eye socket, held in place by an engraved silver band that wrapped snugly around his bald, spotted skull. From his beaded silk sash hung his signed name instrument of power: the Bone-Stylus of the First Notary, a six-inch metal pen ground from the…
