PERSONAE · THE VALE

Hesk Durrow

aka Master-Salvor Durrow, the Green-Handed, the Man Who Knows the Ring

Master-salvor of the Kilns and the Stonewright Moot's factor in Highbridge — keeper of the Old Work market, who can price a piece of imperial bronze by the sound it makes and can no longer work one, because the green wasting has taken the steadiness from his hands. He knows, better than any living smith, that the good Old Work is coming from farther and higher every year, and he is afraid of what that means.

Hesk Durrow is a Stoneborn of the Stonewright Moot, sent down from the deep galleries to keep the Moot's interest in the one trade the Vale cannot exhaust, and he has kept it for twenty years: the Old Work market of the Kilns, where every scrap and working the diggers drag out of the ruins is weighed, priced and sold. He is the best judge of temple-bronze alive. He can tell fresh-dug from long-handled, sound casting from flawed, a mere scrap-bar from an intact working, by the pound and by the ring of it against his knuckle — and it is his knuckle he uses now, because he cannot hold a hammer steady enough to work the metal himself. The shake is the Verdigris Lung, the green wasting that comes off a working life breathing the patina-dust of sealed damp vaults, and Durrow has it the way the master salvors all eventually do: hands first, then the wind, then the mind goes soft. He prices the risk of it into every bar he sells and breathes it in anyway, because the trade fed him and the alternative is a Stoneborn's pension, which is to say a slow return to the deep to die useful. What sits behind Durrow's eyes, and what he will only say to someone he has decided is neither a fool nor a Ledger man, is the pattern in the market's stock. The easy near ruins were stripped generations ago; he has watched, year over year, as the good pieces stop coming from the close diggings and start coming from farther out and higher up, from the passes under the Rampart, from places a sane digger would not go. His people call it the Deepening and mean plain depletion, and Durrow half-believes that and half does not, because depletion does not explain why the strangest workings — the ones that seem cast for no use he can name — come from the highest, worst-kept places, near the old sky-ruins. He is not a crank; he will not say the word 'sky' the way the Skyblamer does, and thinks Coss a sad case. But he keeps the numbers, and the numbers point up, and Hesk Durrow is a craftsman who has learned to distrust a pattern he can measure and cannot explain. Mostly he keeps his head down, prices the bronze, and coughs.

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