The duck-canvas survey tent smelled of animal fat grease, wet wool, and vinegar blotter.
Tomas sat at the folding camp table, two brass lamps fitted with mica panes casting an amber pool of light across the parchment. The wind buffeted the canvas walls, making the guide ropes sing against their spruce stakes. On the table lay Clearance Docket 814-B, retrieved by dispatch runner from Hester Quill’s archive desk in High-Fen.
The parchment was heavy, stiff calfskin, dyed the pale cream favored by the Imperial Ministry of War. At the top, stamped in gold leaf and embossed with the radiant sunburst of the Grand Adventurers’ Guild, was the royal commission: Inquest and Hazardous Demilitarization of the Sunken Bastion of Val-Mora.
Nessa leaned over the table, her dual-cone brass hearing horn resting on a wooden block beside her ink-pot. Sile stood at the tent flap, his arms folded across his boiled-leather brigandine. He watched the dark road outside. On the corner of the table sat a small clay pot dish filled with diluted gallic acid and a glass rod, prepared by Hester for testing suspicious ink layers.
“Look at the wax,” Nessa said, pointing with a bone folder. “The Great Seal of the Guild High judge is stamped in vermilion beeswax. But the margin was trimmed with a razor. Someone sliced this page out of a master register to prevent the docket number from appearing in the annual balance ledger.”
