The six-inch iron street wrench felt like an ingot of freezing lead in Tobin’s hand.
The sixteen-year-old runner did not take the stone steps one at a time. He went up the cellar stairwell in four great, lunging bounds, his hands clawing at the damp mortar for balance, his boots throwing up sheets of gray river silt with every strike. Behind him, the deep subterranean roar of the cavitating flumes chased him like the howling of a pack of hunting dogs through a narrow culvert.
He hit the heavy oak door leading into the Lantern’s taproom with his left shoulder, bursting through into a room that had ceased to resemble a tavern and now looked like an open-air butchery behind a stockade.
The taproom was packed with fifty wounded militia and crying children from the lower street. The air was thick with the greasy smoke of tallow dips, the reek of damp wool, and the sharp, coppery smell of open flesh. On the trestle tables where townsfolk had drunk spiced ale three days ago, men lay stripped to their breeches, their wounds packed with chewed elder-leaves and bound with dirty apron cloth.
Beside the great stone hearth, Jon Hale had stepped up from the cellar threshold for five frantic heartbeats to shout an order to Captain Dain.
