The pre-dawn wind off the lower river smelled of wet herring scales, coal-clinker, and the raw pine planks of the auxiliary water culverts Alden Bram’s crews had laid across Low Sike the afternoon before. Jon Hale walked down the narrow cobbled passage behind the North Quay fish shambles with his shuttered horn lantern held low at his knee, his boots stepping carefully over the iron-strapped timber box-flumes that carried the mill-race overflow toward the twentieth cellar.
Every roof in this quarter of Harth was familiar to him—not from system maps, which he did not possess, but from fifteen years of buying salt-fish, tarred twine, and tallow candles for the River Lantern, and from eleven previous loops of evacuating these back lanes when the south sluice broke or the bridge burned.
He reached the corner of Bessa Karr’s salt-curing shed, lifted the horn lantern to shoulder height, and turned left into the mouth of Cobbler’s Wynd.
His right boot came down two inches lower than his knee expected, jarring his hip-joint against flat river stone where a raised curbstone should have stood.
Jon stopped dead in the freezing drizzle.
In the first six lives—and as recently as the tenth life, when he and Elin had gone door to door selling the fifty silver-crown shares of the Common Charter—Cobbler’s Wynd had been a cramped, crooked alley barely six feet wide between leaning two-story timber-framed workshops. The upper jetties had projected so far over the gutter that two neighbors could shake hands across…
