The garret above the brass foundry in High-Arch smelled of scorched flux, coal smoke, and old paper. The floorboards shook with a steady, rhythmic thudding from the tilt-hammers running in the yard three stories below. It sent fine ripples across the surface of the tea in Hester Quill’s clay pot cup.
Tomas Reed laid his ash-wood ledger boards flat upon the long oak workbench, clearing away discarded crucibles and scraps of brazing wire. Beside him, Master Orson sat hunched on a three-legged stool. His seventy-two-year-old hands shook as he untied the linen ribbons of a thick, sheepskin-bound ledger.
Orson was a small, withered man with pale blue eyes clouded by waterfalls, his fingers stained permanent blue-black from fifty years of handling dark oak-ink and carbon transfer papers. He wore a patched wool cassock that had turned green with age at the elbows. But around his neck hung the heavy bronze key of the Bourse Archive Vault. A key he had carried since the reign of the last king.
“Forty years I’ve kept the registers, Master Reed,” Orson said, his voice a dry, wheezing whisper that barely carried over the thrum of the foundry hammers. “I’ve seen bad harvests, hail storms, early freezes, and rust rot. But I’ve never seen grain options bought with such clockwork, shameless care. When a man buys ten thousand bushels of winter wheat in the third week of spring, he’s either a prophet, a madman. Or a thief who already holds the key to the water…
