The parish hall of St. Jude’s was a long, low-timbered room above the church cloister, lit up by fifteen large south-facing windows that looked out over the crowded, sagging apartments of the Old City. At seven o’clock on Wednesday morning, the rain had finally stopped, replaced by a crisp, pale autumn sunlight that washed across four long frame stand tables where the Office of Unfinished Claims had established the Master Payback Registry.
Tomas Reed sat at the first table, his pack frame propped against the oak wainscoting behind him, his dark-lantern put out and his tools laid out in perfect order: brass measuring tongs. He folded wooden rule, bottle of dark oak-ink, and three steel pens. His left wrist brace was buckled snug, the stiff calfskin providing solid, unbending support to his scarred forearm as his right hand stamped the incoming claim dockets with the new Sovereign Restitution Seal. Beside him, Hester Quill and Scribe Olla were examining baptismal certificates, parish burial registers, and yellowed apprentice indentures, cross-referencing each name against Master Cullen’s master thick parchment roll.
Outside the parish hall, stretching down the stone stairs, through the churchyard, and winding three miles through the narrow alleys of St. Jude’s, waited three thousand people. They were the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the working families whose homes, shops, and livelihoods had been burned up in the total Great Fire of Anno 270. The very disaster that the Commoners’ Mutual Society had been established to shield.
