At the third hour of the afternoon, Cathedral Square was packed with fifteen thousand citizens under a pale, frosty November sky. Working men in patched woolen smocks, weavers in calico aprons, draymen with packing hooks tucked into their hemp belts, apprentice clerks, and women carrying swaddled infants stood shoulder-to-shoulder from the granite stone railing of Saint Jude’s down to the river quays. A cold northern wind blew off the mountain ridges. He carried the faint, clean scent of incoming snow across the slate rooftops of Crown-Reach. The vast crowd stood in total, watchful stillness, their eyes fixed upon the raised wooden platform erected in the center of the square before the high Gothic portals of the cathedral.
On the platform stood the Mechanical Vellum Shredder. A tough heavy-duty engine built specifically for this hour by the master blacksmiths and quarry engineers of Old Flint. Built upon a massive framework of squared mountain oak timbers four inches thick, the machine featured two counter-rotating cylinders of cold-rolled hard dark metal steel, machined with sixty linked razor-sharp shear teeth. A cast-iron flywheel four feet in width and weighing four hundred pounds was geared through a twelve-to-one spur reduction pinion lubricated with sheep fat. The cutter clearance tolerances had been sharpened with fine oilstones to two thousandths of an inch, ensuring that even the thickest multi-ply calfskin or stubborn gold-leaf binding would be sliced cleanly without binding the drive axle. Geared to an ash-wood hand crank, the gearwork was capable of exerting five tons…
