“Stop,” Len Vey whispered into the wet brickwork.
His right hand clawed wildly at the lime mortar joints between the floor flags, trying to haul his eighty pounds of dead weight upright against the curved wall. His boots scrambled in the two inches of sewer runoff. His knees knocked together in a violent, uncontrollable tremor of neurogenic tiredness. The cold river sludge seeped through the eyelets of his leather boots, chilling his toes to numb wooden pegs. But his left side was a screaming fire of torn flesh and bone.
“Stop reading it...” his voice broke, a dry, bloody rasp that barely reached the iron bars of the drop-gate.
The double didn’t stop.
It stood on the overflow weir sixty yards away, framed by the glare of Captain Vance’s copper check lanterns, entirely indifferent to the boy’s agony. It didn’t speak with hatred. It didn’t speak with mockery. Its voice remained flat, measured, and cold and exact. An official receiver reading an inventory of impounded goods from the courthouse steps before a public bankruptcy auction.
It turned another parchment signed name.
Crack.
The stiff rag-bond paper parted with that sharp, dry report that made Bram Ash’s hand tighten on his iron truncheon until the seasoned ash wood groaned under his calloused palm.
