The autumn downpour broke over Bellwether with the fury of a burst pool, drumming against the slate roofs of Tanner’s Alley and turning the narrow cobblestones into a foaming torrent of mud, tan-bark, and sewer overflow.
Tanner’s Alley was barely ten feet wide. It was flanked on one side by the twelve-foot granite retaining wall of Holt Manor. The other side had the rotting timber sheds of the lower sheep-washers. At the river end. There, the lane opened onto the boat ramp of the Western Canal, a thirty-foot timber lighter with muffled oars swung on its mooring lines in the black water.
Tomas Reed stood in the pitch-black shadow of the sheep-wash roof, water pouring from the brim of his wool cap. His left forearm was strapped tight within its cedar splint, the throbbing ache dull and steady beneath his oilcloth cape. At the same time, his sound right hand held his six-foot ash quarterstaff. Beside him, Rowan and Leth leaned against an overturned heavy cart bed that blocked the narrow mouth of the boat ramp, their heavy oak cargo-bats resting against their knees.
Nessa Vale stood three paces back, sheltered beneath an overhanging timber gable. She held her brass sound horn toward the manor’s rear cellar back gate.
At ten minutes past midnight, the iron back gate creaked open. Four lanterns with horn shutters cast narrow, yellow beams across the glistening cobblestones.
Six heavily muscled hired blades in blackened chainmail hauberks and open-faced iron helms emerged into the rain, their leather boots slipping on the wet flags. Between them, mounted upon a four-wheeled cart hauling truck with greased iron axles, was the target:
It was a massive chest of mountain hardwood four feet long, two feet wide, and two feet deep. It was bound with three-inch bands of forged brass held fast with dome-headed rivets. Across the brass hasp hung three heavy lead wafers stamped with the double-eagle seal of the High Court trial of Year Forty-Two. Even in the driving rain, the timber was dark, dense, and iron-hard. Four hundred pounds of living testimony.
Behind the truck walked the mercenary captain. A tall man with a scarred jaw, wearing a cavalry saber and carrying a heavy iron mace.
“Keep moving, you dogs!” the captain hissed, wiping rain from his eyes. “Get the chest into the hold of the cutter! If that boat isn’t past the estuary booms before the dawn bells, the master will have us hanging from the yardarms!”
Tomas Reed stepped out from the shadow of the shed directly into the center of the lane, five paces in front of the hand-truck.
The rain battered his coat. The second, third, and fourth civic seals on his chest hummed with a deep, authoritative deep ring that cut through the thunder like the striking of an iron bell.
Tomas grounded the square iron metal ring of his ash quarterstaff into the cobblestone mud with a sharp, heavy clack that echoed between the granite walls.
“Halt the heavy cart!” Tomas’s voice rang through the downpour, carrying the cold, unchanging power of a lawful carrier. “By power of the High Court of Claims and uncancelled Docket LC-042, that chest is under court attachment! Ground the truck and surrender the cargo to the carrier!”
The mercenary captain stopped dead, his horn lantern flaring as he took in Tomas’s braced left arm and the rough gray wool coat of a South Ward porter.
A harsh, contemptuous laugh tore from the captain’s throat. “The uncalled boy! The master said you might crawl out of the gutters. Hired blades! Clear the lane! Smash his ribs and throw the carcass into the canal!”
The six guards drew their short swords and iron maces, surging forward through the mud.
The mercenary line charged down the ten-foot cobblestone chute. Then, Tomas didn’t retreat a single inch toward the overturned heavy cart bed. Instead, he used the tip of his ash quarterstaff to kick a heavy oak wheel-chock directly beneath the front iron caster of the four-wheeled cart hauling truck carrying the chest. With a violent metal jolt, the four-hundred-pound hardwood coffer lurched sideways in the greasy tan-bark slush, jamming its left axle-tree against a projecting granite stone support prop of Holt Manor’s retaining wall and pinning the rear two hired blades behind its bulk. By immobilizing the freight in the narrowest bottleneck of the lane, Tomas instantly split the six-man escort in half. That forced the front four soldiers to fight on the slick, downhill cobbles without the driving force of their rolling battering-ram.
Beneath the overhanging gable of the sheep-wash shed, Nessa Vale pressed her back against a timber post and raised her brass sound horn toward the upper manor wall. She watched the iron-shod clatter of boots inside the estate courtyard while keeping a sharp eye on the flanks of the hand-truck. Even in the blinding sheets of midnight rain that drummed across the slate roofs, the curved bronze bell allowed her to distinguish the heavy, flat-footed tread of chainmail hauberks in the alley from the higher, ringing rhythm of cavalry spurs mounting up by the carriage stables three hundred yards away. “Three minutes before the upper guard-house hears the steel, Tomas!” she called out clearly over the roar of the gutter torrent. “The rear back gate bar is still unbolted!”
On the right flank of the narrow lane. There, the foaming sewer overflow ran ankle-deep along the rotten pine doorstep of the sheep pens, Leth and the four South Ward wagon drivers didn’t swing their heavy oak cargo-bats in wild overhead arcs that could snag on the low roof edges. Trained by decades of shifting two-ton timber baulks in the cramped holds of river barges, they worked shoulder-to-shoulder in a low, piston-like finger bone. They drove the iron-ringed butts of their ash clubs straight into the knees, shins, and sword-wrists of the mail-clad hired blades. When a trade ring guard in forty pounds of wet chainmail lost his footing on the greasy tan-bark, the wagon drivers’ hobnailed boots pinned his hauberk into the mud before he could draw a dagger from his belt.
Tomas kept his braced left forearm tucked tight against the bronze hook-plate on his breast-strap. That let his right shoulder and hip drive the six-foot mountain ash staff like a long-reach pry-bar down the center of the cobblestones. Every impact of the hired blades’ iron maces against the boiled-linseed shaft sent a hard moving shock through his right palm down into his heels. But his stance on the wet stone remained as rooted as a granite bridge-pier. In his mind’s eye, the three unbroken lead wafers of the High Court trial hanging from the chest’s brass hasp gleamed through the rain. The seven hundred and thirteen signed names that Pell Anker had died to carry down High Orchard Lane thirty-nine autumns ago.
Behind the jammed hand-truck, the two rear hired blades struggled to free their short boarding pikes from the narrow gap between the hardwood chest and the dripping pine boards of the sheep-wash shed, their horn lanterns shattering against the stone support prop and plunging the upper half of the passage into churning shadow. Before the mercenary captain could draw his wheel-lock pistol from beneath his mail hauberk to fire point-blank down the chute, Rowan vaulted over the overturned heavy cart barrier at the mouth of the boat ramp, his eighty-pound oak baulk leveled across his forearms like a siege ram.
From behind the overturned heavy cart, Rowan, Leth, and four veteran wagon drivers leaped into the torchlight, their heavy oak clubs whistling through the rain with the practiced coordination of men who had fought off timber pirates for thirty winters.
The battle for the final precursor claim exploded in the narrow throat of Tanner’s Alley.