Sergeant Vane dropped to his knees in three inches of freezing muck behind the cracked marble stone stand. His hands reached through the sulfur steam to touch young Varo’s face. The eighteen-year-old apprentice was shivering wildly, his teeth chattering so hard he had bitten through his lower lip, his gray eyes glazed with shock.
“Steady, lad,” Vane said. His rough voice dropped into a gentle, brotherly rhythm as he threw a dry sheepskin blanket over the boy’s chest. “It’s Sergeant Vane from the River Watch. Your mother gave me two fresh meat pies this morning and told me to bring you home for supper. We’re getting you out of this mud.”
“The stone, Sergeant...” Varo sobbed, his fingers clawing at Vane’s leather breastplate. “It’s cutting my leg in two... I can’t feel my toes...”
Vane examined the four-foot granite block. It had snapped from the upper stone railing and wedged itself between the boy’s thigh and the bronze base-pipe rim of the stone stand. With cold, practiced care, the sergeant cleared the river mud from beneath the stone with his crowbar. It slid the solid cast-iron base of the ten-ton screw-jack into the narrow gap. “Corvin! Take the lever! Let’s get this weight off him!”
