The bronze tolling from the high northern ridge didn’t die all at once. It decayed in long, shuddering waves, passing through the cold basin until the sulfur fog of the Tram Ward swallowed the upper ringing tones, leaving only a dull shaking in the iron mud beneath Len Vey’s boots.
Across the cobblestones of the central square, five hundred people stood without shifting their feet. They were weavers with dried sizing paste stiffening their aprons, drillers with white limestone dust lining the creases of their necks, mothers holding infants bundled in coarse horse-blankets, and trackmen who had carried their heavy tamping bars upright like iron pikes. No one raised a shout. In twelve years of made night, Rookvale had learned that shouting in an open court brought the night-shift constables with their black oilcloth coats, their copper truncheons, and their zinc-plated clipboards.
Fifteen paces from the staging cart, the hunter stood motionless on the wet flags.
It wore the clean, unbloodied courier coat Len had buttoned at the boundary station four mornings ago. Its cuffs were stiff and dry, free of the lime slurry that stiffened Len’s sleeves. Its boots were black animal fat leather without a scratch on the toe caps, and its hair lay flat against its forehead, undisturbed by the freezing drafts that blew from the railway water chutes. It balanced on the balls of its feet with the easy poise of Burdenless Step, its amber eyes fixed on Len’s face.
