The town criers didn’t go down the stone steps to the muddy lanes of Lowbank to read the decree. They stood seventy feet above, braced against the carved granite stone railing of the Middle Terrace, their long brass horns blaring three flat, piercing notes that cut through the afternoon drizzle like iron knives. Two court guards in scarlet college livery unrolled a massive white parchment banner across the stone low roof wall, weighting its lower hem with lead sinkers so the rising river wind couldn’t flap the words away. Below, on the greasy cobblestones of St. Jude’s Lane, wagon drivers, laundresses, and dockworkers stopped their handcarts in the mud, their heads tilted back as the chief crier’s voice boomed through a sound brass megaphone. It echoed off the wet brick facades.
‘Notice to all inhabitants of the Lower Wards!’ the crier proclaimed, his words echoing through the basin. ‘By supreme order of Master Davin Sorell, High Warden of the Confluence, and confirmed this noon by the Emergency Defense Committee of the High Senate! The district known as Lowbank Basin is hereby declared an active Thaumaturgical Hazard Zone, Grade Four! Unlicensed transit artifacts operated within civilian cellars have corrupted the regional ringing lines, threatening the solid strength of the town water gate drain tubes!’
A low, furious roar rose from the crowd gathered on the ferry boat ramp. Old Orin, his wool coat soaked to a greasy black, spat into the gutter, brandishing a scarred wooden cabbage scoop toward the low roof wall. ‘Corrupted ringing tones? It was their bloody high drain tube that boiled thirty bushels of my winter turnips into gray mash this morning! Now they call us a hazard?’
Pella stood on the kitchen porch beside Eren Tal and Sister Merrow. She watched squads of college guards in boiled leather cuirasses take up positions along the three stone bridges that connected Lowbank to the upper city. Across the Bridge of the Oars, the Miller’s Arch, and the High Conduit Gate, armed court guards dragged heavy timber chevaux-de-frise studded with iron caltrops into place across the roadway. Behind the barricades, academy crossbowmen cocked their weapons, resting the iron stirrups against the wet stone.
‘They’ve barred the gates,’ Eren said, his voice flat with wheelwright disgust. He pulled a stick of red chalk from his apron, rolling it slowly between his broad, scarred thumbs. ‘No timber drays coming down from the High Tor sawmills. No coal carts from the eastern pits. And the grain lighters tied up at the wharf won’t be allowed to winch a single sack up to our bakeries.’
Sister Merrow brought out the Courtesy Bridge slate that Pella had carried down from the high chambers. The quartz face hummed with cold blue light, displaying the exact legal text of the emergency edict as transcribed from the town telegraph wire.
‘A total commercial embargo,’ Merrow said, her dark, sunken eyes scanning the fifth line without a trace of pause. ‘Sorell is moving fast. He wants to starve this basin out before the forty-eight-hour sea-court stay expires. If the bakeries in Lowbank run out of flour, and the tenants start smashing windows for bread, he can march his tunnel diggers in under the banner of restoring public safety. He won’t need an arch-breaker warrant. He’ll just declare martial law and drag our brass frame to the high tower in an ammunition cart.’
‘The bakeries won’t riot today,’ Pella said, her eyes fixed on the barricades above. ‘We have four days of wheat flour stored in the dry bins behind the medicine room. The fishing skiffs can still land salt herring on the south mudflats past the boom. But Sorell isn’t trying to starve our bellies. He’s trying to starve our workshop.’
‘He knows the deep baked-clay gallery under this floor is cracking,’ Pella continued, her hand tracing the damp timber railing of the porch. ‘He knows the collar joint is leaking boiling salt water at bone-crushing pressure. If we can’t buy ash balks to shore up the ceiling, and we can’t buy sheet lead to clamp the split, the vault collapses on its own. He doesn’t need to break down our door. He just has to wait for the river to crush us in the dark, and then he can tell the Senate that the lower wards were destroyed by unlicensed civilian meddling.’
Eren wiped a streak of spruce resin from his forearm with the corner of his leather apron. ‘We have twelve seasoned spruce floor beams in my yard, Pella. That’s enough to shore sixty feet of gallery if we notch the tenons tight and double-wedge the footings. But spruce rots fast in steam. In sixty-degree stone vapor, green spruce softens like boiled turnip in three weeks. We need cured white oak. The white oak is stacked behind the High Tor toll gate under academy guard.’
Young Tavi came skidding around the corner of the larder shed, his bare elbows scraped and his woolen cap soaked through with drizzle. ‘Sister Merrow! Pella! The guards on the Miller’s Arch just arrested Old Vane’s cart driver! He was trying to bring down two sacks of salt and a firkin of lard from the Middle Terrace! They tipped his cart into the ditch. The sergeant said if anyone else tries to cross the red line, they’ll spend the winter in the lower water-cells!’
Merrow didn’t flinch. She set a heavy hand on Tavi’s shoulder, squeezing until the boy stopped gasping. ‘Vane’s cart driver was always a fool who took the center lane at noon. Go down to the boatyard, Tavi. Tell Master Renn that we need four empty water barrels scrubbed with soda ash. If they’ve cut the high aqueduct lead, we catch the rainwater off the chapel roof edges. Move, boy. Standing in the rain won’t fill a barrel.’
A breathless shout came from the alley behind the ropewalk. Dima Fen, the master tailor of Lowbank, came hurrying up the back kitchen steps, his bottle-green velvet cap soaked with rain and his woolen mantle spattered with yellow clay. His thin, sharp face was pale with skilled outrage. ‘Pella! Sister Merrow! Have you seen the Conduit Gate? The college guards turned back my wagon of heavy English sailcloth from the Upper Looms! They said no textiles may pass into an active hazard sector! I have three orders for caulking smocks and five funeral coats on my benches, and I have nothing in my storehouse but scraps of local marsh reed! How am I supposed to clothe working men in reed-cloth? It’s stiff as wicker, the needles snap on the fiber nodes, and the moment it gets hot, the grain curls like fried bacon!’
Pella turned to look at the agitated tailor. Her mind, attuned by long training to find the unclosed gaps in rigid structures, caught the implication instantly. ‘Reed-cloth,’ she repeated, her voice dropping into quiet concentration. ‘Dima, how many bundles of raw river reed do you have curing in your drying lofts?’
‘Two hundred bundles,’ Dima stammered, his glasses slipping down his nose. ‘The marsh-cutters brought them in from the southern saltings before the equinox tide. It’s peasant fiber, Pella! We weave it into potato sacks and coal hampers! You can’t sew a protective steam suit out of marsh weed! It has no stretch, it chafes the skin raw, and if you expose it to high-pressure steam, the wearer will be parboiled inside his own clothes!’
‘Not if the weave is offset,’ Pella said, stepping toward the cellar stairs. ‘Not if the seams are designed with overlapping, vented gussets. Jo Saye told me two days ago that modern canvas is too dense for high-pressure steam. She said dense canvas traps boiling cooled water against the wool lining. You need a natural reed fiber that swells when wet to shed boiling droplets, while offset back vents let body heat escape.’
Eren Tal straightened up, his eyes sharpening as he looked from Pella to the tailor. ‘River reed swells forty percent when soaked in salt water. We use cured reed plugs to seal ship hulls when the caulking blows at sea. The wetter it gets, the tighter the joint.’
‘Exactly,’ Pella said. ‘Sorell thinks he’s locked us in an iron box. He thinks because we can’t buy college wool and high-terrace lead, we have to surrender our workshop. But we don’t need his upper looms. We have two hundred bundles of salt-marsh reed, Dima’s cutting shears. An alterations specialist sitting in Harrowby who understands how an elbow bends under load.’
She reached for the brass latch of the cellar door. ‘Eren, light the hardened carbon-iron lamps. Dima, bring two bundles of your best cured reed-cloth to the washroom bench. We’re going to open the Courtesy Bridge, and we’re going to design a steam suit that can walk into live salt water without blistering a single inch of skin.’
Dima looked at the heavy barred door, then at Eren’s broad carpenter’s hands, and finally at Pella’s calm, grease-stained face. The tailor swallowed hard, adjusted his glasses, and wiped the rain from his beard with a linen handkerchief. ‘Very well. But if that foreign woman cuts my reed-cloth on the straight grain instead of the bias, I’m telling her myself. Marsh reed only bends on the bias.’
‘You can tell her yourself, Dima,’ Pella said, a dry smile touching the corners of her mouth as the cellar door swung open into the dark. ‘Her lunch break starts in twenty minutes, and she doesn’t like having her time wasted.’ Together, they dropped the stone steps into the humming heart of Lowbank.