The garret above the bookbinders’ lane smelled of animal glue, powdered alum, and the bitter vinegar of stale iron dark oak-ink. Dust motes drifted through the high slanting skylight. It fell like fine gray pollen across tables piled with town rolls, parchment rolls. Then it split calfskin covers stripped from obsolete court dockets.
Hester Quill sat behind an ink-stained desk of seasoned walnut, a pair of steel-rimmed glasses perched on the sharp ridge of her nose. Her white hair was pinned into a severe knot at the nape of her neck, secured by a long bone needle-point arrow. She didn’t look up when Tomas climbed the narrow wooden stair. But her split reed pen continued its rhythmic, dry scratching across a sheet of heavy rag thick parchment.
“Close the door behind you, Tomas,” she said, her voice dry as crumbling sheepskin. “The apprentice in the glue-room downstairs is boiling horse hooves again. The steam curls my margins.”
Tomas closed the door. He set his lead-lined leather courier case on the corner of the desk. “I need you to look at an extraction bond from Year 023. Mount Sunder. The Deep Gallery.”
The scratching stopped. Hester laid the reed pen across the horn ink-stand, took off her glasses. Then she wiped the lenses with the corner of her linen kerchief. Her dark, hawkish eyes fixed on Tomas with sudden, cold intensity.
