In the quiet washhouse cellar of the South Ward, the autumn rain dripped steadily through the high stone floor grating. It splashed into the copper rinse tubs with a hollow, rhythmic sound.
Tomas Reed sat on a low bench of split pine beside the hearth, his left forearm resting in its cedar splint. The wound was six days old now. The violent, throbbing heat had subsided into a dull, deep ache that reached down to the bone surface of his forearm bone. But the stiffness was permanent. He tried to flex his fingers. Then, the thumb and forefinger moved with stubborn, leathery friction. Meanwhile, the middle and ring fingers remained locked at sixty-five percent of their former reach.
On the scrubbed table before him lay the fragile, yellowed courier receipt of deceased Courier Pell Anker—the final paper trace of Docket LC-042-WITNESS.
Beside him, Nessa Vale was adjusting the brass hair-width on her sound horn. Meanwhile, Sera Reed stirred a steaming pot of barley broth over the embers. Emmet Reed sat by the door, his carved willow crutch resting against his knee. He ran his thumb over his worn leather strop.
“Pell Anker was the senior courier of the North Gate in forty-two,” Emmet said, his gravelly voice low and shiny. “An honest man who carried for the High Court trial. On the morning of the flood, when the water was roaring through the Willow Weir, seven hundred and thirteen commoners, lock-keepers, and wagon drivers signed their depositions in Awl Court, swearing they saw Holt’s troopers lock the belfry and drive the iron wedge into Gauge Three. They packed the parchment rolls into a hardwood chest four feet long, bound with forged brass bands and sealed with three town lead wafers.”
Tomas leaned forward, resting his sound right hand on the yellow receipt, and invoked *Trace the Link*.
The amber slate flared across his field of vision, its radiant light lighting up the fading ink and the dried thumbprints on the sheepskin slip.
Through the careful connection of Last Claim, the physical custody trail unfolded before Tomas’s mind with total clarity. He felt the weight of the four-hundred-pound hardwood chest resting in the bed of Pell Anker’s two-wheeled cart. He saw the rain driving across High Orchard Lane at midnight. He saw four cavalrymen in dark blue cloaks stepping out of the shadows of Captain Darven Holt’s carriage archway, leveling short crossbows.
He saw Pell Anker struck down in the mud, his courier’s badge ripped from his throat. He saw the heavy hardwood chest carried by four soldiers down the outside stone cellar stairs of Holt Manor, through an underground iron door. Then he deposited onto a granite stone base in the sub-cellar beneath the private wine vaults.
For thirty-nine years, that chest had never moved. It had remained locked in the dry, dark bedrock beneath Holt’s dining room, guarded by three feet of mortared stone and a forged iron deadbolt.
“The chest is there,” Tomas whispered, opening his eyes as the amber light faded. “In the sub-cellar beneath Holt’s mansion on High Orchard Lane. The lead wafers have never been broken. Holt didn’t burn the witness roll because he kept it as insurance against his fellow conspirators on the Restoration Council.”
Nessa looked up from her instruments, her gray eyes sharp and determined. “Holt Manor is a castle, Tomas. It has twelve-foot outer edge walls of dressed granite, iron-spiked crests, and twenty private hired blades on gate duty. A carrier can’t simply walk up to the front door with an ash staff and demand a four-hundred-pound chest.”
Tomas looked down at his braced arm, then at his father’s steady hands. “I won’t have to break the gate, Nessa. Holt knows I closed the Fourth Seal. He knows the net is closing around him. Look at the street.”
Through the high cellar window, the iron-rimmed wheels of a private carriage rumbled to a halt on the cobblestones above. A liveried footman in dark blue wool stepped down. It carried an ivory-handled cane and a sealed letter bearing the embossed crest of the North Weir Trade ring.
Before the footman’s cane struck the street-level door of the washhouse, Sera Reed wiped her lye-reddened hands on her coarse linen apron. It lifted the iron latch-bar. Then it met the trade ring servant on the upper threshold so he couldn’t peer down into the cellar where the survey charts and Pell Anker’s receipt lay spread across the pine table. Down by the copper rinse tubs, Emmet Reed quietly slid the yellowed courier slip beneath the false cedar bottom of his tool-box, his scarred carpenter’s fingers moving with the calm, practiced caution of a working man who had lived forty years under the shadow of town court guards. When Sera returned down the stone steps a moment later and handed Tomas the heavy cream-parchment summons sealed with Darven Holt’s silver heron crest. Her face was were pale in the hearth-light. But her fingers didn’t tremble as she adjusted the linen sling around her son’s braced left arm.
Tomas broke the silver wax wafer with his right thumb and tilted the thick parchment toward the embers, invoking Read the Record to inspect the composition of the summons before reading a single word of the polite high court script. Beneath the formal invitation to attend a private settlement conference at Holt Manor at four o’clock that afternoon, the amber light revealed a faint, backup impression pressed through the paper from the blotter on Holt’s desk—the draft heading of a town arrest warrant for criminal slander and unlawful entry, already drawn up by Registrar Caldus Marr and waiting only for Tomas to either accept a bribe or step across the manor threshold without a court witness. Holt was not summoning him out of curiosity. The captain was setting a two-jawed iron trap on High Orchard Lane.
At the scrubbed pine table, Nessa Vale right away packed her brass sound horn and a fresh leather-bound witness book into her oilskin haversack, checking the tension of her bronze tuning-forks against the table edge. She pointed out that under Section Twenty-Two of the Bond Court Code, any respondent summoned to a private settlement conference over an active lawful docket had the total right to bring one sworn court guard of the court and one licensed technical tax clerk as far as the outer gatehouse lodge. If Guard Kroll stood at the drawbridge wicket with his iron-tipped mace. Meanwhile, Nessa trained her curved sound horn across the snake-like paving of the inner courtyard, not a word spoken inside Holt’s dining hall would go unrecorded on the court register.
Emmet Reed stood up from his bench by the door, bracing his weight on his carved willow crutch as he took down a clean, freshly oiled leather pack-strap from the wall peg and buckled it across Tomas’s right shoulder to balance the bronze hook-plate on the cedar splint. The old porter looked at the four faded blue ink-lines tattooed across his own crippled knee from the freight-yard collapse twenty years ago, then looked up into his son’s steady gray eyes, recognizing that the time for hiding in the back-door alleys of the South Ward had passed forever.
Emmet reached for his crutch, his jaw tightening. “Holt has sent his livery, Tomas.”
Tomas took up his ash staff with his right hand, rising to his feet with calm, unrushed balance. “Let’s see what the captain wants to buy.”