The entrance to the Great Scriptoria of the Dead Synod didn’t look like an archive. It looked like an iron-bound water gate designed to swallow a river.
Ren Vale crouched beneath the shadow of a dark rock stone support prop. He pulled the heavy, grease-stained smock of an itinerant dead-house restorer over his wool tunic. The coarse raw, unwhitened hemp was stiff with dried gum arabic and stale sulfur, smelling faintly of cold animal fat and embalming lime. But it fully hidden his leather apron and the ivory mammoth awl sheathed at his hip.
Beside him, Necro-Scribe Ren adjusted his dark black glass glasses. He tied a frayed black linen apron over his mort-cloth coat. In his left hand, the Bone Notary carried a battered pine carrier box fitted with six heavy clay inkpots, three bone scrapers, and a bundle of dried goose-quills.
“Keep your head angled downward thirty degrees,” the Bone Notary rasped in his dry, undertaker flat voice. “The overseers in the Great Scriptoria don’t inspect faces. They inspect quills. If your nib is wet and your fingers are stained, you’re merely part of the furniture. If you look up, they will notice you have a pulse.”
In Ren’s inner coat pocket, the silver plane of the Speculum grew faintly warm. From the eighth tier of the glass, the sharp, fastidious voice of Scribe Ren—the King’s Forger—whispered through the gold-silver metal bezel.
