The High Engineers’ Guildhall didn’t look like a place where men calculated the dead weight of granite or measured the bending of roof timbers.
It looked like a royal palace. Built of polished pink red stone and white mountain limestone, its grand classical roofed porch thrust forward into the paved expanse of Sovereign Square, supported by twelve fluted Corinthian columns whose carved capitals were crusted with real gold leaf. Above the bronze double doors, a huge marble frieze depicted the Founders of Crown-Reach seated among allegorical figures of Shape, Astronomy. Divine Stonework, while kneeling commoners at their feet offered up baskets of quarried stone and sacks of grain.
Tomas Reed climbed the fifteen broad marble steps slowly, the iron nails in his heavy porter’s boots clicking sharply against the polished stone. Beside him walked Hester Quill, her black scholar’s gown catching the autumn breeze. It grabbed the approved transcript of the embezzled endowment under her arm like a headsman’s warrant. In his left hand, Tomas carried a rough burlap sack that sagged with twenty pounds of dense, jagged stone.
Four guild sentries in plum-colored wool tunics and polished steel breastplates blocked the bronze entrance. Each man carried a six-foot partisan with a gold-trimmed blade, their arms crossed in rigid, arrogant defiance.
