The silence that filled the forge shop was cold, heavy, and deep.
Outside in the rail cut, the sounds of Chancellor Morn’s assault were retreating northward. Deprived of the sixty-cycle town circuits, every streetlamp, switch signal, and lit up aimed marker along the switchbacks had gone dark. The guards, unable to navigate the greasy granite ledges without light and scared of falling into the flooded under-road drains below, were falling back in disarray toward the fortified ridge of the Observatory Ward. Their boots clattered in chaotic retreat across the upper overhead frame plates. Their officers shouted desperate commands through brass trumpets to prevent their columns from scattering into the pitch-black railway cuts.
Inside the four brick walls of the forge shop, the air had cooled until Len Vey’s breath plumed in pale white clouds before his face.
Bram Ash stood beside the carpenter’s workbench. He held a two-inch stub of animal fat candle in his sound left hand. The tiny yellow flame threw a flickering circle of light across Doma Reel’s face. There, the white linen handkerchief lay motionless, and across the folded white apron resting over her patched leather boots. The defected court guard’s face looked as though it had been carved from old oak, gray with tiredness, the skin around his eyes bruised by forty hours of waking vigils.
