Tomas was tying the tarred hemp rope around the iron rung of the well ladder when Nessa suddenly froze. Her hand rose in a sharp gesture of silence.
She raised her brass sound horn toward the yellow mist that rolled across the northern channel. Her eyes widened behind her vinegar mask.
“Oarlock friction,” Nessa whispered, her voice tight with alarm. “Two muffled sweeps... Seventy yards off the port quarter and closing fast.”
Tomas dropped the crowbar, seized his six-foot ash quarterstaff. Then he stepped to the edge of the granite terrace.
Out of the dense, yellow sulfur haze, a long, black flatboat glided silently toward the platform. It was powered by two oarsmen in greasy leather buff-coats, their faces wrapped in black cloth masks. In the bow stood a broad, heavily muscled man wearing a sleeveless brigandine of rusted iron scales.
He had a flattened, broken nose that had healed crooked across his face, a jagged scar running from his left temple down to his jawline, and small, cruel eyes the color of dirty river ice.
It was Sergeant Dren. The former North Weir cavalryman who had barred the door on Jory Pell thirty-nine years before, now Darven Holt’s private guard on the waterfront.
“Well, well,” Dren’s harsh, gravelly voice cut through the damp air like a dull saw. “The South Ward uncalled boy. Master Doss told the captain you were sniffing around the old flood dockets. We thought we’d have to drag the Silt Ditch to find your corpse, Reed. But you saved us the trouble by rowing right into the fire.”
Dren leaped from the flatboat’s bow onto the granite terrace with the heavy, balanced agility of an experienced killer. The two oarsmen followed, drawing three-foot iron-bound cudgels and short boarding pikes.
Dren reached to his hip and drew an eighteen-inch curved skinning knife. Along the inner curve of the heavy steel blade was a row of vicious, backward-pointing serrated teeth, sharpened to razor sharpness, designed to hook flesh and rip tendons from bone.
Sile Rook tried to rise from the wall. His right hand reached for his eight-foot hooked pruning blade. But the painful chemical burn across his shoulder sent him crashing back against the stone with a strangled cry.
“Stay down, old dog,” Dren sneered, flicking the flat of his blade toward Sile. “Your hooked pruning blade won’t save you today. The captain’s orders are very simple, Reed: no living witnesses leave this marsh, and whatever you pull out of that well goes to the bottom of the deep channel with fifty pounds of melted rock waste.”
Nessa stepped behind Tomas, her land-mapper’s tripod raised like a defensive spear, her sound horn hanging secure at her throat.
Tomas stepped between the hired blades and the wounded captain. He didn’t speak. A porter doesn’t negotiate with the thieves who try to hijack his freight. He lowered his balance point, planting his hobnailed boots six inches apart on the dry granite flags. His hands gripped the oiled ash quarterstaff with two-thirds of the wood extended forward.
“Take him,” Dren ordered with a contemptuous wave of his left hand. “Break his legs first. I want him to watch while I slit the land-mapper’s throat.”
The two oarsmen surged forward, their iron cudgels whistling through the sulfur mist.
Tomas met the charge with the cold, practiced economy of a cart driver who had fought off drunken river footpads in the dark alleys of Bellwether.
The first cudgeler swung a vicious level blow at his ribs. Then, Tomas dipped his knees, caught the iron head on the square steel metal ring of his quarterstaff, and with a sharp, upward snap of his wrists, drove the butt-end directly into the man’s throat.
The mercenary choked, dropping his heavy club as he stumbled backward into the black water.
Before the second oarsman could bring his short boarding pike to bear in the cramped ten-foot gap between the intake low roof wall and the terrace steps, Nessa Vale drove the iron-shod legs of her oak land-mapper’s tripod straight into the mercenary’s face, shattering his cloth mask and forcing him to throw up both arms to protect his eyes. At the same time, from the base of the stone wall, Sile Rook braced his uninjured right boot against a stonework joint and swept the hooked iron head of his eight-foot hooked pruning blade horizontally across the slime-coated flags. The curved steel bill caught the second mercenary behind the left ankle, shearing through his greased boot-leather and dumping him flat onto his back at the edge of the landing. There, a single thrust of Nessa’s tripod pinned his pike-arm against the wet granite.
Across the narrow platform, Sergeant Dren didn’t look back at his fallen oarsmen. His small, ice-colored eyes remained fixed on Tomas’s footwork as he circled toward the dry stonework beside the well-head to gain firm traction for his boots. Dren’s sleeveless iron-scale brigandine clinked softly beneath his buff-coat, the overlapping plates smeared with black axle-grease to resist the marsh damp. At the same time, his left hand snatched a heavy iron belaying-pin from his belt to block the reach of the six-foot ash staff. He had fought canal strikers and dock rioters for thirty winters under Captain Darven Holt’s banner. He knew that the only way to beat a long-staff man on a narrow stone pier was to crowd inside the metal ring arc and butcher the forearms that held the wood.
Tomas shifted his rear boot two inches back against the dry granite coping of the drain tube well. It slid his palms along the boiled-linseed shaft of his mountain ash staff to shorten the lever arm for close-in work. The yellow sulfur mist swirled around their knees, smelling of scorched wool, spilled lime wash, and the copper tang of the mercenary’s blood dripping down the landing steps into the black lagoon. With Sile crippled against the low roof wall and Nessa holding the downed pikeman at the boat-stairs, the entire survival of the fourth precursor docket rested on the three paces of slick stone between Tomas’s chest and Dren’s serrated steel.
Down in the black water beside the flatboat’s bow, the first cudgeler whom Tomas had struck in the throat was thrashing blindly against the slimy granite steps, his leather buff-coat smoking where the acidic surface scum soaked through the seams. The commotion in the lagoon had already drawn the attention of the marsh’s apex scavengers. Ten yards out from the landing apron, three long, pale-blue soft glow trails rose from the underwater iron trash-rack. It curved silently toward the struggling mercenary as the feral discharge eels hunted the shakes in the warm burning acid. Neither Dren nor Tomas spared a glance for the water. Both men knew that on the twelve-foot stonework crown of Station Three, whoever lost his footing on the green algae would never climb the steps again.
Dren feinted high with the iron belaying-pin in his left fist, trying to draw the upper metal ring of Tomas’s quarterstaff away from his centerline. Meanwhile, his hobnailed boots ground into the dry lime dust spilled from Nessa’s flagon. When Tomas refused to bite on the high feint—keeping the seasoned mountain ash angled low across his hip like a wagon-tongue—Dren spat a curse through his crooked teeth, dropped his center of weight beneath the staff’s lead third. Then he drove his iron-scaled shoulder straight into the charge.
Behind Dren’s shoulder, the third mercenary at the stern of the black flatboat fumbled with a rusted iron boat-hook, trying to snag the gunwale of Sile’s zinc-sheathed skiff and cut their only line of retreat out of the marsh. Seeing the threat through the yellow sulfur haze, Sile Rook shifted his grip on the eight-foot hooked pruning blade with his single working hand and drove the top spike downward into the flatboat’s pine bow-post. It locked the two hulls five feet apart so the mercenary could neither board the terrace nor reach the manila thick ship rope on the bollard.
But Dren was already moving, his hooked knife flashing in a deadly low arc toward Tomas’s belly.