The return voyage across the Weeping Delta was carried out under the cover of a dense sulfur fog inversion that blanketed the marsh channels in five feet of solid, greasy white mist.
Tomas Reed knelt in the waist of the punt, his hands resting flat upon the cold lead lid of Alia Sen’s dispatch chest. The boat was heavily laden now—four passengers, the seventy-pound lead chest, Nessa’s survey gear, and Marta’s bundles of dry evidence scrolls—leaving barely three inches of freeboard above the dark, sluggish water.
Pip worked the ash pole with a slow, silent rhythm, never lifting the iron shoe entirely out of the water to prevent the telltale drip-plip-drip that could carry across the quiet fen for half a mile.
Beside the boy stood Marta, her keen eyes piercing the fog with the instinct of a hunter who had lived thirty winters among these reeds. Every hundred paces, she tapped Pip’s shoulder with two fingers, guiding the punt through narrow, hidden cuts between the willow islands that appeared on no official map.
“Halt the pole,” Marta whispered suddenly, her hand clamping down on Pip’s wrist.
The punt glided to an immediate stop, slipping into the shadow of a sprawling black willow whose trailing roots hung into the channel like tangled hair.
