The High court of Escrows smelled of cold limestone, dried calfskin, and thirty ages of dead animal fat candles.
It was a cavernous, rib-vaulted hall that occupied the entire ground level of the Old Treasury, three streets north of the Sky-Spire. Here, behind heavy wrought-iron grilles that looked more suited to a lion pit than an office, four hundred clerks sat on high ash stools, dipping goose quills into heavy clay inkpots and scratching endless numerical entries into calfskin folios. The air was so dry from lime dust that Tomas could feel his lips chapping within ten paces of the threshold. Every cough echoed against the high stone vaulting like the dry rattle of gravel sliding down an iron chute.
Hester Quill walked beside him. Her ivory folio-knife was tucked into the leather belt of her black scholar’s gown, her double-lens wire glasses perched crookedly upon the bridge of her hooked nose. At sixty-four, her hair was the color of winter frost. But her step was brisk, deliberate, and entirely devoid of deference. She carried a stiff calfskin portfolio under her left arm, swollen with thirty years of country tax precedents and court rulings.
“The third arch on the left,” Hester said. Her voice was sharp as an ungreased gate hinge. “The Ledger Room of Dormant Endowments. The Chief Clerk is a man named Barnaby Finch. His grandfather was an under-turnkey at the debtor’s prison. Finch inherited the family talent for keeping doors locked and keys out of sight. Remember…
