The iron gates of Holt Manor slammed shut behind Tomas with a heavy, echoing boom that echoed across High Orchard Lane.
Court guard Kroll and Nessa Vale were waiting on the drawbridge, surrounded by the gathering twilight. Nessa looked at Tomas’s face, read the hard, unbending set of his jaw, and right away collapsed her land-mapper’s tripod.
“He refused?” Nessa asked.
“He offered five hundred gold crowns to burn the ledger,” Tomas answered, adjusting his pack straps. “And he’s calling out the City Watch.”
“We must reach the Bond Court before the night bells,” Court guard Kroll said. His face was pale and anxious. “If Magistrate Wren can issue a protective court writ—”
Before Kroll could finish his sentence, the heavy bronze alarm bell of the Citadel Tower began to swing three miles to the east. A rapid, rhythmic double-stroke that signaled a Capital Municipal Hue and Cry.
From down the boulevard of High Orchard Lane, the clatter of twenty armored cavalry horses rumbled over the cobblestones. Mounted watchmen in buff coats and iron breastplates. He carried torches and heavy crossbows, swept around the corner of the avenue. He shouted for all citizens to clear the way.
A sergeant on a gray gelding unfurled a broad sheet of red parchment, his voice booming through the misty street:
“By order of the High court and the Board of Restoration! A capital warrant is issued for the arrest of the vagrant Tomas Reed and the land-mapper Nessa Vale! Charged with seditious conspiracy, extortion of guild officials. The felonious theft of sacred town relics! Any citizen offering them shelter will be hanged without trial! Five silver crowns for their capture, dead or alive!”
“The High court has signed Holt’s warrant,” Court guard Kroll whispered in horror. “Holt bypassed the Bond Court entirely. The City Watch has summary execution orders. Tomas, they won’t bring you to trial. They will cut your throat in the street!”
From the shadow of a garden wall fifty yards down the lane, a low whistle sounded—three sharp notes like a curlew’s call.
Rowan’s massive dark shape stepped out of an unlit carriage passage. It was flanked by Leth and six South Ward wagon drivers carrying heavy oak wheel-clubs.
“This way, Tomas!” Rowan hissed, waving them into the dark passage. “The Fish Gate and the Weaver’s Gate are blocked with pikes! Holt has sixty hired blades sweeping the lower quays! You can’t reach the court on foot!”
Tomas, Nessa, and Kroll sprinted into the passage. Just then, the cavalry patrol thunderously passed the entrance. Their torches casting leapt red shadows against the garden wall.
They ducked through a narrow alley, climbed over a timber coal-fence. Then they dropped a flight of slippery stone steps into the underground darkness of the South Ward under-road drains.
The water in the drainage channel was knee-deep, cold, and foul. But it was hidden beneath twenty feet of street paving. Rowan led the way with a muffled grease-lamp, his boots splashing through the dark current.
“Where do we go, Rowan?” Nessa asked, her sound horn catching the distant rumble of cavalry hooves on the stone floor overhead.
“To the only place in Bellwether where twenty watchmen can’t search without drowning in boiling lye,” Rowan answered with a fierce, toothless grin. “To your mother’s washhouse, Tomas.”
Tomas waded through the black under-road drain water. His sound right hand kept his haversack held high above the splash line. His braced left arm was tucked close to his heart.
Above the curved brick crown of the underground drain, the heavy iron-shod hooves of the City Watch cavalry echoed through the mortar joints like distant thunder as patrols galloped southward toward the Weaver’s Gate and Awl Court. Before dropping the coal-fence steps into the sewer channel, Bailiff Kroll had handed Tomas his own stamped bronze court guard’s token and slipped away through the back garden of the Tallow-Chandlers’ Hall to carry Nessa’s wax sound tablets directly to Magistrate Wren’s night chambers. While the old court officer raced to secure an emergency bench indictment before the High court could lock the courthouse doors, Tomas, Nessa, Rowan. Leth navigated the four-foot brick barrel-drain that carried the waste water of the upper breweries down toward the South Basin.
Every two hundred yards along the flooded stonework tunnel, where lateral street-gullies dropped through iron grates from the alleys overhead, red torchlight and the barked orders of watch sergeants filtered down through the mist. Tomas used the square iron metal ring of his six-foot ash quarterstaff to probe the slick, grease-coated invert bricks ahead of Rowan’s boots, guiding the party past sunken drop-pits and rusted sewer-flaps that Emmet Reed had taught him to map. Just then, he was a boy of twelve hauling fuller’s earth beneath the dye-works. The rich lords of High Orchard Lane had designed the city’s drainage system to flush their refuse unseen beneath the cobbles of the working wards, never imagining that those same brick arteries would serve as a covered highway for the porters they hunted.
Behind Tomas, Nessa Vale walked with her wet skirt pinned up to her knees and her land-mapper’s satchel strapped high across her chest, periodically pressing the rim of her brass sound horn against the weeping lime mortar of the tunnel wall. By reading the solid-borne shakes traveling through the stone foundations of the street above, she was able to track the exact deployment of Holt’s sixty private hired blades and the twenty town watch squads. A double pike-cordon had been thrown across the timber deck of the Canal Bridge, while two mobile search parties were systematically battering in the cellar doors of every carter’s stable along Rope Walk.
Leth brought up the rear of the column with two young South Ward draymen, pausing at each brick junction-chamber to wedge oak chocks into the iron check manholes so that no watch patrol with bloodhounds could lift a street cover and drop into the channel behind them. The tunnel sloped downward toward the low-lying foundations of the Reed family laundry. Then, the foul, cold brewery runoff gradually grew warm and cloudy with white wood-ash lye and scalding soap-suds draining from Sera Reed’s twelve-foot copper vats. Filling the dark brick vault with a bitter-salt steam so thick and biting that it burned away the smell of river mud and muffled the splash of their boots.
At the final stonework bend before the washhouse water gate-grate, Tomas paused to check the oilskin wrapping around his Last Claim ledger and the four precursor seals inside his coat. The capital warrant read out by the mounted sergeant on High Orchard Lane had named him a seditious thief of town relics, yet under the lawful constitution of Bellwether, an uncancelled carrier’s bond took legal precedence over any office decree signed without an open court trial hearing. So long as he kept the physical evidence dry and brought the four-hundred-pound hardwood chest onto the public steelyard before the morning court convened, Holt’s summary execution order was nothing more than ink on stolen sheepskin.
Rowan lifted his muffled grease-lamp toward the soot-blackened keystone of the laundry outfall arch. There, three notched bricks marked the private storm-gate Emmet Reed had mortared into the cellar foundation thirty years ago. With two short thrusts of his iron crowbar, Leth pried back the counterweighted oak flap inside the grate, releasing a rolling cloud of hot potash vapor from the washhouse vats above and opening a dry crawlway straight into the coal-cellar behind Sera’s boilers.
The city that had tried to drown four thousand commoners forty years ago was hunting him like a wolf in its sewers. But a river porter knew every drain, every under-road drain, and every cellar in the South Ward.
They reached the washhouse grating as the eighth hour began to chime.