The smoke in the lower vaults was not the clean, sweet smoke of burning oak logs. It was an oily, choking fog that coated the throat in soot and burned the eyes with the acid sting of boiling ink. Tomas Reed knelt beside the third pile of salvaged folios. His fingers shook with tiredness as he inspected the heavy sheepskin ledgers that had been saved from the torch.
Linnea and Marek were already beside him, their traveling desks set up on an overturned limestone packing crate. Linnea held a damp linen cloth over her nose, her eyes red-rimmed and streaming. But her fingers were steady as she used a horn bone-folder to pry apart the stiffened pages of a massive folio bound in scorched calfskin: The Northern Mining Cantons · Orphan & Disability Register (Years 715–735).
“Look at the margins, Tomas,” Linnea whispered, her voice hoarse from the smoke. “This isn’t an old fire. The ink is still wet under the soot.”
Tomas brought his animal fat lantern close to the sheepskin. Across the columns of names, a deliberate and systematic campaign of erasure had been carried out within the last forty-eight hours. The original entries—inscribed twenty years ago in a dark, brownish-purple iron-gall hand—listed the names of hundreds of miners from the Karst pits who had lost eyes, limbs, or lives in the deep limestone shafts, alongside their tightened monthly pensions of two to four silver coins.
