The service alley behind the High District terrace ran along the base of an ancient dry-stone retaining wall, where dark rock blocks the size of hay wagons held back the weight of the upper gardens. Above their heads, the bare branches of dead plum trees poked through the iron palisades like blackened wire against the slate ceiling of the sky.
Len moved with his right hand steady on the ash shaft of his sounding pole. His shoulder was pressed against the damp rock. His boots found the narrow drainage gutter between the cobbles and the wall foundation. A line where the mud was packed hard and the grit didn’t rattle under a footfall.
His body was battered. His left forearm, bound between two cedar laths and wrapped in coarse horsehair-stitched linen, throbbed with a persistent, low-grade fever heat that sent sharp, thready twinges of pain down through the tendons of his thumb whenever he shifted his weight. His knees were stiff from crawling through the steam channels. His shoulder blades ached from the pull of his courier harness. And behind his breastbone, the raw, empty void where his sixth and seventh milestones had been torn away still felt like an unhealed razor-sharp cavity.
