Two days after his delivery to the Survey Office, an autumn squall swept down from the northern peaks of the Guard range. That brought thirty-six hours of cold, relentless rain that drummed against the slate shingles of the River posthouse.
Len Vey lay on his narrow rope bed in the small, whitewashed attic room beneath the gables. He listened to the water stream from the zinc gutters.
Outside, the valley was drowned in a thick, grey mountain mist that had swallowed the willow trees along the canal. Then it turned the cart roads into gravelly soup. The drops lashed against the four-paned dormer window in sharp, rattling volleys. It was driven by a biting northerly wind that had stripped the last yellow leaves from the poplars in the courtyard.
Inside the bed, Len’s body was acting as an air-pressure instrument of unsparing, clockwork care.
The first signal came from his left forearm. Beneath the coarse flannel wrapping he wore to sleep, the shaft of the forearm bone was throbbing with a deep, heavy, rhythmic ache that seemed to come directly from the marrow cavity. It wasn’t the sharp, hot agony of an unhealed fracture, nor the terrifying, electric heat of an emergence channel. It was the dull, dragging pressure of bone tissue reacting to a sudden tiny drop in air pressure.
