KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK.
“Jon Hale! Elin! Open the front latch—we saw black smoke rolling over the ridge-tiles from South Lane, and we have water-buckets at the door!”
The booming voice outside the front taproom panels belonged to Baker Dunstan Harl—Shareholder Number One on the fifty-share town compact—and right behind his baritone rose the deep, gravelly call of Mason Guildmaster Marris Gault and the urgent murmur of at least a dozen other neighbors who had dropped their evening tools and come running up the cobbles with leather fire-pails when they smelled pine-tar smoke coming from their newly chartered refuge.
Inside the kitchen, around the rim of the four-foot smoking chasm in the floorboards, the six people who had fought the fire exchanged a single, quiet look across the blackened joists.
In the first nine lives, whenever the shadow of the Crown Furnace or the Returner’s loop had touched the River Lantern, Jon Hale’s first instinct had always been to bolt the front shutters, sweep the ashes under a rug, and tell the neighbors who knocked on the taproom door that a chimney pot had smoked or a kettle of fat had tipped over on the hob. He had carried the knowledge of the repeating days like a man carrying a stolen plague-corpse under his cloak, terrified that if ordinary bakers, masons, and widows ever saw the machinery beneath the town, panic or the Chancellery bailiffs would destroy them all.
