The market square of High Karst on the morning after the fire was paved with cold slush and quiet, unrushed purpose. Across the wide limestone terrace, four heavy oak carpentry benches had been dragged from the cooperage, set end-to-end to form an eighty-foot tally table. Overhead, stretched between the carved stone lamp-brackets, clean canvas tarpaulins shielded the benches from the intermittent mountain flurries. On the table sat twenty wooden bins filled with checked pension slips, three sets of brass balance scales. The iron strongbox that Brom and his quarrymen had crowbarred from behind the walnut wainscoting of Guildmaster Karr’s bedchamber.
Tomas Reed stood at the center of the bench, wearing his worn wool coat and his tarred cart driver gloves. His left wrist brace was strapped firm over fresh linen wrapping, the dull ache in his scarred forearm subdued by the rhythmic, cold discipline of the work. Beside him, Hester Quill sat with her inkpot wedged into a drilled hole in the oak timber, her dual-lens glasses catching the gray mountain light as she compared each applicant’s parish identification token against the reconstructed rolls.
Before the table stood a queue of two hundred people. Miners with missing fingers or clouded eyes, elderly widows wrapped in frayed woolen shawls, and young apprentices who had never known their fathers. They stood in total silence, their boot heels clicking softly on the flat stone slabs, their breath rising like prayer smoke into the winter air.
