The Great Chamber of the High Guild Assembly was a tiered arena of tiered oak benches rising beneath a vaulted ceiling carved with the gold-trimmed heraldry of the realm’s eighty master guilds. Huge bronze chandeliers holding hundreds of spermaceti candles cast a brilliant, warm amber light across the floor. He drove away the autumn gloom that pressed against the high window row windows. The smell in the hall was a rich mixture of imported civet perfume, expensive pipe weed, polished dark wood, and the faint, waxen tang of hundreds of burning tapers.
In the public gallery, crammed into a narrow, unpadded wooden bench between a coal carter from the East Docks and an elderly wool-spinner in a patched apron, Tomas Reed sat in silence. His ash-wood pack frame rested between his shins. Its empty hemp straps were tucked neatly out of the way of passing spectators. His left wrist brace throbbed with the dry heat of the chamber, the crowded human warmth doing little to ease the stiff tendon gristle beneath the leather.
To his right, the coal carter, a broad-shouldered man named Brand whose fingernails were permanently black with hard coal dust, nudged Tomas with his elbow. “Look at the table in the well of the house,” Brand muttered. He nodded toward the floor. “Four clerks from the Treasury, every one of them holding red velvet folders. Vane brought the whole High court staff to make sure nobody asks where the river bonds went.”
