Leaden autumn rain drizzled through the narrow cobblestone lanes outside Sister Merrow’s kitchen. That turned the limestone dust of Fish Street into a slick gray paste. The alley smelled of wet heavy cart-horse manure, bituminous coal smoke from the forge shop, rain-washed slate roofs. The faint, metal ozone scent that clung to academy runners’ cloaks. Down at the bottom of the lane, the Gray Rush surged brown and swollen against the ferry wooden support posts.
His eyes scanned the rain-swept alley with the sharp, defensive vigilance of a veteran rigger watching for total collapse. Foreman Eren Tal kept his two-foot firmer chisel tucked inside his oilskin sleeve. At twenty-three, Eren knew every doorway, rain barrel, and overhanging timber jetty between the High Sluice steps and the marsh turning basin.
Identifying and tracking academy surveillance agents posted along Fish Street following Sorell’s failed negotiation. Master Sorell had not walked back up the hill empty-handed. Before reaching the Sunken Gate turnpike, the Dean had detached three surveillance pickets to watch every cart and foot-passenger entering the workshop.
Eren leaned against the cooperage gate, pretending to inspect a split hoop while watching two men in dark wool cloaks standing fifty yards up the lane. Eren used his carpenter’s distance eye and the sound of footsteps on wet cobbles. He mapped three watching posts established within two hundred yards of the back kitchen door. The observers were third-year students wearing wagon drivers’ caps, their soft white hands and expensive boots giving them away instantly…
