"Could you two help me find the paper from yesterday with the lower reaches of the Tem marked on it? It should be on that table." Liston, hunched over the table drawing a map, set down his pen and straightened up, working the stiffness out of his neck.
A faint crack seemed to come from his spine. The ache reminded him that if he kept this up, a slipped disc wasn't far off.
Father Adrian was lying on a chaise longue nearby. His health wouldn't allow him to sit or stand for long, so every time he wrote half a page, he had to rest for quite a while.
Over the past few days, he'd been in frequent contact with several friends who traded in ore, as well as friends of friends. At night, he'd gone with Kraft from one tavern to another throughout the Harbor District. It had worn him out.
A string of bubbly snores came from behind his cheek. It looked like they wouldn't be able to count on him for a while.
Most of the work fell to Kraft. Turning the casual chatter he'd written down into useful information wasn't easy.
In an ideal world, the information would be, "There's a mine here, it started operating in this year, and it closed a few years later."
But in reality, it was usually more like, "I think," "probably," or "maybe" someone had "heard" from someone else at a supply point that the source had changed.
Never mind that the places and dates were all vague; the reliability alone was questionable. Unlike Kraft, most people had imperfect memories. It was perfectly normal for them to misremember things.
So after recording and summarizing what he'd heard, Kraft still had to sort through it all, item by item, and file