Master Alaric Voss

Master of the Walls and political head of the Cambridge Collegium, though he may neither issue nor overturn a single certification. A stone man by training, he is the first Master in forty years to come up from the yards rather than the Schola.

Outside Cambridge no office is so misunderstood as the one Alaric Voss holds. The Master of the Walls decides no certification and can overturn none. He governs procedure, appointment and discipline, and the Collegium’s dealings with the Crown, the great houses and Oxford: a political office held by a technical man, a tension that has broken two of the last six Masters. Yet when the realm faces a crisis of certification, it is his name that is spoken, for he is the face through which the assay courts of the White Walls meet everyone else.

Voss came to the Collegium by apprenticeship at a bench rather than through the Schola, as about a third of the membership does, and he mentions it. His election was contested, reckoned in the benches a correction and in the Schola a lapse, and his quarrels with Rector Simon Vey are watched closely because Cambridge keeps teaching and judgement deliberately apart. The bench masters value good access to him; the First Warden of the Guild of Artificers has sat with him on more joint committees than he enjoys remembering, and he does not make the mistake of treating the guilds as decorative.

Three years into a five-year term, he has spent it on the two questions his predecessors left alone: the Crown exception, and whether the Collegium ought to regulate the rural benches it has four times declined to license. He is understood to favour publishing the long-withheld report on the Severin affair and to lack the votes. He has come close to saying aloud what the town will not, that the monopoly is defended because nobody has proposed an alternative that would not leave people dead. Every seven years he renegotiates in person the Collegium’s great grain and fodder contract with the storage houses of Coldwell, the one occasion on which Cambridge treats anybody as an equal.

Companies seldom meet the Master over a single certificate, since he cannot change one. They meet him when their business has become a matter of procedure, discipline or the Collegium’s standing with a house or the Crown, and they find a cool, exact man who knows the master of every yard in the town by name.

In person

Alaric Voss is young for his office, thin and precise, with black hair cut straight and sharp, a very pale, narrow and angular face, dark brows and grey-green eyes. A small burn scar runs along his jaw, the mark of the yards he came from. He wears the black and gold of Collegium dress, and at his breast hangs a large gold medallion set with a red stone that glows from within and is never out of sight. His habit is a cool, direct examination, and at the assay table a downward concentration that shuts out the room.