The oil-soaked pitch flared against the damp brickwork of the dispatch cellar, throwing long, jittering smears of red light across forty pairs of hollowed eyes. It was ten minutes past five in the afternoon, but in the Tram Ward the concept of afternoon was an academic fiction. The sky shield hung as flat and black as oiled slate, lit up only by the dying orange ember of the forge shop chimney pipe two hundred yards down the cut. The air in the trench was thick with sulfur fog and the bitter reek of charred pine resin, stinging the membranes of Len Vey’s nostrils until every breath tasted of ash and wet rust.
Len stood with his shoulder blades pressed into the upright tongue-and-groove planks of the cellar door. The oak was cold, wet with water drops that trickled down the heavy iron bolt heads. But the outside chill was nothing compared to the sickening ache streaming from his left arm. The cedar splints Doma Reel had strapped around his forearm three nights ago were cracked at the wrist. He was bound in place by grease-blackened harness webbing. Every heartbeat sent a sharp, rhythmic spike through the fractured radius, reminding him of the falling iron railing in the Survey courtyard when Urel’s family had been hauled through the service trench. In his waistcoat pocket, resting against his lower ribs, the stamped brass boiler washer—stamped T-07, with its three filed teeth—felt heavy as an anvil.
