Midnight brought a dead, freezing calm to the shell mound.
The fog had settled into a low, stationary bank that lay across the tidal flats like a lake of chilled milk. It rose barely two feet above the mud. That left the upper crest of the shell ridge exposed beneath a canopy of cold, brilliant autumn stars. Around the dying embers of the survey camp’s two fire bowls, sixty refugees slept huddled together beneath canvas tarpaulins and wagon tilts. Their exhausted breathing rose in faint, pale plumes of steam into the night air.
Tomas sat on an upturned nail keg near the southern tip of the ridge, his ash-wood pack frame resting against his knee.
He wasn’t sleeping. He held his small pocket stone in his right hand, slowly drawing the oiled grit across the cutting edge of his iron pry-bar with a soft, rhythmic shhk-shhk. In his left wrist, the calfskin brace was unbuckled. That let the cool air soothe the throbbing ache in his scar tissue. But his fingers remained alert, curled lightly around his hickory walking staff.
Beside him, Sile Rook sat fully motionless on a dark rock paving block they had salvaged from the mud, his oak tall body-shield planted in the shell gravel between his boots, his scarred face turned toward the dark water of the western channel.
“Sound,” Sile whispered, so low the word was barely more than a breath out.
Tomas stopped his stone instantly.
He listened. Across the smooth, glassy surface of the slack water, three hundred yards out in the fog, came a faint, rhythmic sound. The muffled, greasy squeak of an oar turning inside a leather-padded rowlock. It was followed by the soft, oily parting of tidal water.
“Muffled oars,” Tomas murmured, slipping the sharpening stone into his vest pocket. “Greased leather.”
“Four oars,” Sile calculated. His hand tightened around the ash shaft of his hooked pruning blade. “Heavy timber hull. Coming from the direction of Toll-Post One.”
Nessa Vale was beside them before Tomas could turn his head. She hadn’t been asleep. She knelt on the gravel. Her brass sound tube was pressed to her ear, the flare pointed down toward the water’s edge.
“One boat,” Nessa said, her voice flat and cold. “Low in the water. Six men, judging by the shifted weight thrum against the shell bank. They have their rowlocks wrapped in greasy wool.”
Tomas stood up quietly. He motioned to Sile. He pointed toward the narrow gravel spit where the skiff would have to beach to avoid the sucking mud of the lateral sloughs.
“No shouting,” Tomas said softly. “The children are sleeping. We take them at the water’s edge.”
They moved down the slope of bleached oyster shells like shadows, their boots making no more noise on the gravel than a light breeze through dry leaves.
At the water’s edge, thirty paces from the sleeping camp, the black bow of a heavy river skiff emerged from the low fog.
The vessel was sixteen feet long, built of rough pine planking painted with black coal-tar to make it invisible in the dark. On the thwarts sat four oarsmen wearing dark wool caps pulled down to their eyes, while in the bow stood two men in iron-riveted leather jacks. It held short, broad-bladed boarder’s axes and glass bottles with hemp rags stuffed into the necks. Fire-bottles filled with turpentine and coal oil.
The skiff’s flat bottom grounded on the shell gravel with a soft, wet crunch.
“Quiet, you dogs,” the lead man in the bow hissed. He stepped over the gunwale into ankle-deep water. He was a squat, heavily muscled mercenary with a scarred eyebrow and an iron heavy club hanging from his wrist. “Corve said burn the tents first. If the porter or the deaf girl gets out, knock their teeth down their throats and throw them into the drain tube. Leave the paper in the fire.”
“Looking for paper, friend?” a gravelly voice rasped from the darkness five paces away.
The mercenary froze, his boot caught in the gravel.
Sile Rook stepped out of the fog. His oak tall body-shield rose in front of him like a movable stone wall.
Before the mercenary could swing his boarder’s axe, Sile drove the iron-heavy bottom rim of the tall body-shield straight into the man’s breastbone with the bone-shaking force of a battering ram. The breath exploded from the thug’s lungs in a violent, whistling gasp. He flew backward four feet, crashing into the shallow water, his axe splashing harmlessly into the weeds.
“Raid!” the second man in the bow screamed, raising his glass fire-bottle to strike it against his iron striker.
Tomas moved.
He didn’t use a blade. He took one long, low cart driver’s stride forward. His hickory walking staff swept horizontally across the surface of the water like an oar blade. The heavy seasoned wood struck the mercenary’s wrist with a sharp, sickening CRACK.
The glass bottle slipped from the man’s numbed fingers, falling into the wet gravel. Tomas caught the thug by the collar of his leather jack with his sound right hand, spinning him off-balance and driving him face-down into the cold, sharp oyster shells with the unbending leverage of a porter pinning a fallen sack of grain.
In the skiff, the four oarsmen panicked.
“Back water!” the lead rower yelled, wildly digging his oar into the gravel. “Back her out!”
Nessa Vale stepped to the water’s edge.
She didn’t have an axe or a shield. In her hands she held an eight-foot iron survey sounding pole, its tip ground to a sharp, hardened chisel point. With a smooth, clockwork thrust, she drove the iron chisel straight through the bottom planking of the skiff between the second rower’s boots.
CRACK-SPLINTER.
The two-inch pine plank split like kindling under the impact. Cold, dark river water surged up through the hole in a violent, frothing fountain, filling the bottom of the skiff in seconds.
“My boat!” the rower screamed, scrambling over the thwarts as freezing water flooded over his ankles.
Sile Rook stepped into the shallows. His hooked pruning blade dropped across the gunwale with a heavy, metal thud that splintered the oak rub-rail.
“Drop the oars into the water,” Sile rasped. His voice shook with the cold power of a veteran watch captain. “Hands on the gunwale where I can see the fingers. Anyone moves a foot, and I’ll open the rest of the bottom planking.”
Tomas picked up one of the boarder’s axes that had fallen into the shallow water.
The blade was six inches broad, forged from cheap bog-iron. But the cutting edge had been ground on an emery wheel until it was sharp enough to shave hair from a forearm. The poll of the axe was shaped into a heavy, four-sided spike designed to smash through iron hasps and deed-box locks. Across the ash wooden handle, three notches had been cut near the grip. The marks of an enforcement thug who took pride in the violence he sold to merchant factors.
He threw the axe down onto the shell mound, where it stuck shaking in a piece of drift-timber.
“Sile,” Tomas said, “check their pockets. Look for written orders, receipts, or token money.”
Sile knelt beside the shivering prisoners, his massive hands conducting a systematic, rough search that left no seam uninspected. From the lead mercenary’s leather jack, he pulled out a heavy deerskin pouch that jingled with silver coin, along with a folded square of dirty paper sealed with a blob of black tar.
The four oarsmen dropped their sweeps instantly, their hands flying up into the cold air, their faces gray with terror as they stood knee-deep in the rising water inside their own sinking boat.
Within two minutes, all six trade ring hired blades were disarmed. Their hands were tied behind their backs with three-strand hemp rope. They sat in a miserable, shivering row on the gravel spit.
Tomas stood over them, holding the recovered glass fire-bottle in his right hand. He pulled out the hemp rag, sniffing the dark, pungent liquid inside.
“Coal-tar turpentine,” Tomas said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. “A town arson charge under Section Four of the Royal Criminal Code. Carries fifteen years of hard labor in the mountain granite quarries.”
The lead mercenary, his chest bruised and wheezing, looked up with sullen hatred. “You can’t prove who sent us, porter. You have no paper on this boat.”
Nessa knelt beside the sunken skiff, holding her pocket magnifying glass over the forward thwart.
“Look at the brand on the oak rib,” Nessa said, her voice clear and precise in the night air. “Burned into the wood with a hot iron: S.R.S. - PROPERTY OF FACTOR CORVE. Stamped with the trade ring’s inventory number forty-two.”
She looked at Tomas, a faint, cold smile touching the corners of her mouth.
“They brought their own receipt, Tomas,” Nessa said. “Signed by the factor himself.”
Tomas nodded, turning to Apprentice Olla, who had come down to the spit with her recording slate and an animal fat lantern.
“Log the impoundment, Olla,” Tomas directed. “One sixteen-foot trade ring timber skiff, taken away under common defense provisions. Six prisoners held for delivery to the Maritime Patrol cutter. Cargo seized: four boarder’s axes, two fire-bottles, and eight deep-water lengths of greased hemp line.”
Tomas unfolded the paper by the light of Olla’s lantern.
The handwriting was hasty, written with a split quill on the back of an old customs receipt:
To Gault: Take four boatmen and two iron-heads. Clear the shell spit before dawn. Burn the canvas. If the carrier’s ledger is destroyed, pay the men ten silver crowns from the safe. Don’t let them reach the court tomorrow. Signed: C.
“C for Corve,” Tomas said, folding the paper and placing it inside his lead-lined satchel. “An explicit conspiracy to commit arson and murder to suppress evidence in an active public audit. Magistrate Kroll would have to be blind, deaf, and dead to dismiss this paper.”
“Kroll isn’t dead,” Sile muttered, tying the prisoners’ ankles together with a single running loop of manila hemp. “He’s just expensive. But this paper makes him an accessory to capital treason if he tries to bury it.”
He looked at the shivering hired blades. “Put them under Sile’s shield until dawn. We have a survey to finish. I don’t want these men catching cold before they meet the judge.”