Headmaster Corvus didn’t keep his office at the top of the Spire of Antiquity heated like the student common rooms.
When the clerk let Kaelen and me through the double oak doors on the sixth floor, the circular stone study was cold enough that I could see my breath against the bookshelves, and the tall lancet windows overlooking the lake were propped open an inch at the latches to let the winter draft blow straight across his desk.
Corvus sat behind a long table of dark walnut piled high with quartermaster ledgers, wearing a plain grey wool dressing gown over his black scholar’s coat, with a tin mug of cold beef broth sitting untouched by his inkwell.
He didn’t ask why my boots were covered in grey lye-soap suds, or why there was a dried smear of Marta Vane-Sule’s blood on the cuff of my sleeve. He just held out a long, scarred hand for the waxed butcher-paper packet I had cut out of the laundry sack and Ross’s tin strongbox.
"Where are the two men now?" Corvus asked, taking a small bone paper-knife from his desk tray and slitting the waxed twine on the packet.
"Bottom of the third-floor service stairs in the basement wash-house," I said. "Luckas and Nia are sitting on them. The Sospurro clerk—Marta Vane-Sule—has a broken left radius from the iron mangle wheel, and we took a fourteen-inch trench stiletto and a brass knuckle-knife off him. Deputy Auditor Ross isn’t hurt, just wet."
"And the two washerwomen?" Kaelen added quietly.
"Deaf as posts," I said. "Though they saw the flash when Marta broke a phosphorus tube on the rollers. Luckas told them a gas pipe leaked behind the drying curtains and gave them a silver mark each to go sit in the kitchen."
Corvus unfolded the waxed paper flat on his blotter.
Inside weren’t wagon serial numbers this time. There were three sheets of thin blue linen drafting paper, folded into eighths and stamped across the top margin in red ink: CORPS OF ENGINEERS — WESTERN MARCHES — ARCHIVE COPY.
I leaned half an inch forward over the edge of the desk, looking down at the upside-down drawings.
Even from across the table, I recognized the contour lines from Professor Orlov’s blackboard. It was a detailed surveyor’s plan of the five-mile gorge at Whispering Pass—specifically, the twelve timber-and-masonry snow sheds built over the narrowest switchbacks to keep spring avalanches from burying the military road between our border and the Kingdom of Sospurro.
Someone had taken a fine red pen and marked six small crosses along the retaining piers of Gallery Four and Gallery Seven, with exact measurements in feet and inches showing where the stone anchors were bolted into the rotten shale cliffside.
Pinned to the corner of the blueprint was a single half-sheet of third-floor Academy owl paper with three lines of purple numbers written in Ross’s neat clerk’s hand.
Corvus didn’t need Ross’s cipher book to read the numbers; he opened the tin strongbox Kaelen set on the corner of the desk, pulled out Ross’s pocket calendar, and compared the dates beside the ink smudges.
"Saturday, December twelfth. Nine o’clock at night," Corvus murmured, his pale eyes moving across the page without a flicker of expression. "The Old Glassworks on Weir Island, half a mile below Wharf Four. Colonel Hadeon is bringing the stress-load tables for the eastern retaining wall in person, in exchange for a draft on the Bank of Sfirt for forty thousand silver marks and passage on a salt schooner out of the southern bays."
Corvus laid the bone paper-knife down neatly parallel to his inkwell and looked up at the two of us.
"Did anyone see you come up the back stairs from the wash-house?" he asked.
"No, sir," Kaelen said. "The corridors are empty for the holiday."
Corvus reached under the edge of his walnut desk and pulled a flat brass bell-pull twice.
Ten seconds later, a side door hidden behind the astronomy charts opened, and Master Bram stepped into the room. The old quartermaster didn’t have his leather smithing apron on; he was wearing a heavy black wool brigandine with the tarnished silver badge of a retired Sergeant-Major of the Imperial Citadel Guard pinned to the breast, and a short iron-headed cudgel tucked into his belt.
"Bram," Corvus said calmly. "Take four of your deafest armourers down the kitchen stairs to the wash-house with two large wicker laundry hampers. Put Mister Ross in one hamper and Lord Lorenzo’s clerk in the other. Carry them down through the coal tunnel to the old powder magazine under the north cliff—not the main guardhouse cells where the orderlies gossip. Set the sapper’s arm so it doesn’t fester, keep a gag in his mouth, and leave two men outside the iron door with loaded crossbows until Sunday morning."
Bram didn’t blink. "And if the bookkeeper starts crying while he’s in the basket?"
"Pour a ladle of cold brine over his head and tell him there’s plenty more at the bottom of the lake," Corvus said. "Then go out to the south bridge gatehouse. Tell the corporal of the guard to drop the heavy iron portcullis on both ends of the span. Fifteen minutes ago, a runaway ice barge from the upper lake struck the center limestone pier of the south bridge. Until the royal masons inspect the arch on Monday morning, not a single horse, sleigh, or pedestrian crosses between this island and the city."
Bram gave a short, ugly grin with his half-missing ear twitching. "Terrible thing, winter ice. Always hitting bridges right when folks want to go to town. I’ll have the chains up in five minutes."
The old quartermaster ducked back out through the side door, his heavy boots making remarkably little sound on the stone stairs.
I waited until the hidden door clicked shut, then looked across the walnut desk at the Headmaster.
"You aren’t arresting Lord Lorenzo," I said.
"I cannot arrest Lord Lorenzo, Lieutenant," Corvus said, leaning back in his wooden chair and lacing his long fingers together over his stomach. "Lord Lorenzo carries a personal letter of credence stamped with the Great Seal of King Alfonzo of Sospurro. Under the Treaty of the Eighty-Year Peace, his person, his servants, and his baggage sleighs are sovereign territory of the Sospurro Crown. If I march Imperial soldiers into the West Guest House tonight and drag the leader of the southern baronial faction out in irons based on the word of a terrified Academy clerk, what do you think happens in Sospurro by Wednesday?"
"Lorenzo’s cousins in the southern hills say the Empire violated the treaty," Kaelen said quietly, "and they open the mountain passes to Viganator before the snow even melts."
"Precisely," Corvus nodded. "Duke Ramiro is a drunken fool who only holds the northern river forts because the Emperor pays his artillerymen’s wages. The southern earls own the silver mines, the grain wagons, and two-thirds of the horses. Right now, half of those southern earls are sitting on the fence, waiting to see whether Viganator is strong enough to win before they commit to treason. If I arrest Lorenzo without placing Colonel Hadeon—an Imperial general officer caught in the act of handing over frontier fortress plans to Viganator agents—directly in front of King Alfonzo’s embassy first, we lose the war before your 7th Legion even packs its tents."
"What about sending the city garrison to pick up Colonel Hadeon at his town house tonight?" I asked.
"Colonel Hadeon sits on the three-man Logistics Board of the War Ministry," Corvus replied dryly. "His brother-in-law is the Deputy Provost of the City Watch, and three senators on the Military Appropriations Committee hold shares in the same Sospurro mining syndicate that bought his debts. If I send an official warrant across the telegraph wire from this office tonight, Hadeon will have a fast horse out the western city gate twenty minutes before the Watch knocks on his front door—and he’ll take the original stress-load tables for Whispering Pass with him."
Corvus tapped the blue engineering drawing on his desk with one fingernail.
"Right now, Hadeon doesn’t know Ross and Marta were caught in the cellar," Corvus said. "And as long as that south bridge stays locked until Sunday morning, Lord Lorenzo has no way to send a rider down into the city to tell Hadeon the Friday drop failed. Hadeon will walk into the Old Glassworks on Weir Island tomorrow night at nine o’clock expecting to meet Marta Vane-Sule and collect his forty thousand marks."
I looked down at the red crosses marked on the Whispering Pass snow-sheds, then back up at the Headmaster’s cold, pale eyes.
"Except Lorenzo knows Marta went down to the wash-house at four o’clock," I said slowly. "When Marta isn’t back at the West Guest House by cinco-thirty, Lorenzo will know we have him."
"He will," Corvus agreed. "And he will try very hard to get a message off this island before tomorrow night to have his city people kill Hadeon at the Glassworks rather than let Hadeon fall into my hands alive."
"The telegraph wire," Kaelen said immediately. "In the administration basement."
"Master Bram already cut the copper ground-wire behind the battery jars on his way up the stairs," Corvus said calmly. "And all carrier pigeons in the loft were fed salted oats an hour ago; they won’t fly further than the stable roof before Monday."
I stared at the Headmaster for two seconds. He hadn’t waited for us to bring the packet upstairs—he had been watching the third-floor annex since Wednesday.
"You knew we were setting a trap at the laundry chute," I said.
"I am a Shoot Elongation scholar who has lived in this stone pile for forty years, Cadet Elvit," Corvus said mildly, picking up his mug of cold beef broth and taking a small sip. "When four first-years spend three days measuring the broom closets on the third floor and bribing the laundry boy to go buy imaginary boot grease, I generally notice. Frankly, I wanted to see whether you and Cadet Kaelen would make a mess of it before I stepped in. You didn’t. Breaking the sapper’s arm in the mangle was a little noisy, though effective."
He set the tin mug down and opened the middle drawer of his desk, pulling out four plain brass dock-worker passes stamped with the harbor master’s lead tokens, along with a small iron key to the Academy’s emergency boathouse down in the cove below the Kennels.
"If I send Citadel Guards in uniform off the island tomorrow night, Lord Lorenzo’s people watching the south bridge from the city side will spot the boat and clear out of Weir Island before eight o’clock," Corvus said, sliding the four brass tokens and the iron key across the walnut wood toward me. "However, First-Year Squad Seven already holds an active Independent Reconnaissance Warrant signed by the War Ministry—including by Colonel Hadeon himself, ironically enough. Under military law, you are authorized to arrest any Imperial officer attempting to cross a frontier line with classified engineering surveys."
"You want us to take the rowboat out of the kennel cove tomorrow night," I said, picking up the cold iron key with my left hand, "and grab Hadeon at the Old Glassworks before Viganator’s river crew gets him."