The drainage channel beneath the Slagged Spires smelled of acid, stale lime, and boiled lavender.
Ren Vale crawled through the narrow dark rock passage on his elbows and knees, his joints grinding with each forward push. The stone was slick with condensed time grease. A cool, lavender-tinted sludge that clung to the knees of his trousers. Then he made his palms prickle. Behind him, the faint scraping of leather boots echoed against the low ceiling.
“Keep your head down,” Ren whispered back into the dark. “The check grates overhead have copper trip-wires.”
A quiet, cynical snort came from behind him. “You don’t need to tell a forger how to avoid an eye-slit, little brother,” Scribe Ren murmured.
The summon crawled forward, moving with the agile, hunch-shouldered smooth speed of a man who had spent thirty years dodging royal court guards in dusty archives. He was lean, clad in a grease-stained wool coat whose sleeves were pinned with steel bodkins. His hands were long, spidery, and permanently discolored—his fingertips and wrists dyed deep indigo from three decades of working with raw iron-gall reagents. Behind his right ear rested the Silver-Nipped Reservoir Quill.
They reached the end of the chimney pipe, where an iron grate opened into the sub-level sorting vault. Ren pulled his brass scraper from his field kit, slipped the flat blade between the rusted hinge and the mortar. Then he levered the grate upward. It swung open without a sound.
