The descent from High District to River Ward was not merely a change in height. It was an abrupt plunge through the economic, heavy-duty, and living strata of a dying province.
Within fifty paces of the gatehouse turnstile, the smooth dark rock pavers of High Street gave way to rough-crushed melted rock waste from the old foundry pits. Another hundred paces down the thirty-degree slope, the melted rock waste disappeared entirely, replaced by raw river silt and rotting timber corduroy laid over black, sucking mud that pulled at the heels of Len’s boots with a wet, squelching pushback.
The heat plummeted with terrifying speed. The dry, artificial warmth of the upper terraces vanished, swallowed by a heavy, freezing humidity that rolled upward from the river bottom. The air tasted of wet lime, coal tar, decomposing weed. The sharp, nauseating stench of untreated tannery drain water dumped from the leather vats two miles upstream. It was a choking draft that coated the tongue with an oily, bitter film.
Overhead light deteriorated with every yard they dropped. The towering iron palisades and brilliant copper reflectors of the city court were gone. In their place, crude pine posts had been driven into the mud at eighty-pace intervals, each supporting a battered tin lantern fitted with a cracked horn pane. The lanterns burned with a sputtering, greasy green flame that threw sickly, yellow-green pools of light across the muck, leaving vast halls of total, iron-hard darkness between them.
