The clash in Tanner’s Alley was violent, confined, and thunderous.
Rowan met the first two hired blades with the crushing impact of an eighty-pound oak timber baulk, slamming it horizontally into their chest-plates and driving them back into the mud with shattered ribs. Leth and the wagon drivers closed with their cargo bats, the sound of iron striking seasoned hardwood ringing above the hiss of the downpour.
Tomas engaged the mercenary captain. Tomas used his sound right arm. He brought his six-foot ash quarterstaff up in a tight upright block. It caught the dropping sweep of the captain’s iron mace on the steel metal ring. The impact sent a shocking jolt through his right shoulder, but the seasoned mountain ash held true.
With a swift, low pivot, Tomas hooked the butt-end behind the captain’s knee, jerking the man off balance into the cobblestone gutter.
Suddenly, a fourth mercenary who had slipped through the shadows behind the hand-truck saw Nessa Vale standing beneath the sheep-washer’s gable. Recognizing her as the land-mapper who had documented Holt’s fraud, the soldier raised his heavy, flanged iron mace and charged her.
“Land-mapper! Look out!” Tomas roared through the rain.
Nessa brought her three-jointed levelling staff up in a desperate two-handed guard. The heavy iron mace struck the brass fittings of the staff with terrible, bone-crushing driving force, shearing the hardwood in half.
The follow-through pipe rim of the mace struck the flared brass bell of Nessa’s sound horn.
With a sharp, tearing screech of buckled metal, the delicate instrument was crushed like an eggshell. The silver chain snapped from her throat. The crumpled ruin of brass fell into the mud, trampled beneath the soldier’s iron-shod boot.
The violent blast wave of the impact slammed Nessa backward against the granite wall. Her head struck the stone, and she slid to her knees in the mud.
In that instant, the world went fully, terrifyingly silent for Nessa Vale. The roar of the pouring downpour, the shouts of the combatants, the clang of steel on oak—all vanished into a dead, choking void of total sound darkness. She reached for her collar, her fingers finding only torn velvet ribbon and cold skin.
Tomas saw her fall. A cold, ancient fury seized him.
Ignoring the searing ache in his braced left forearm, Tomas lunged across the lane. He swung his six-foot quarterstaff like a scythe with his right arm. He drove the iron metal ring directly beneath the mercenary’s chin. The soldier’s head snapped back, his teeth shattering, and he collapsed limp into the churning mud.
Tomas knelt beside Nessa, pulling her to her feet with his right arm. Her eyes were wide, dilated with terror and disorientation as she stared at his moving lips, unable to hear a single shaking.
Tomas didn’t try to speak. He pressed her hand firmly against his chest, right over the humming amber slate. That let her feel the deep, steady rhythm of the carrier’s pulse. She looked into his gray eyes, saw the steady certainty there, and nodded once. She wiped blood and rain from her forehead.
Down the lane, the sound of mounted cavalry whistles began to shrill. Holt’s estate reinforcements were mounting up in the upper courtyard!
“Tomas!” Rowan shouted, his breath coming in ragged gasps as he stood over the two leftover guards. “The cavalry is at the gate! We have two minutes before twenty lances come down this alley! We can’t drag four hundred pounds of hardwood on broken wheels!”
Tomas looked at the massive chest resting on the tilted hand-truck. With his shattered left forearm, he could never lift two hundred pounds alone.
He stepped to the truck, gripped the heavy brass lifting handle on the right side with his sound right hand, and looked Rowan dead in the eye.
“Rowan! Take the left handle! Consent to the load!”
The veteran carter didn’t hesitate. He locked his massive, calloused palms around the opposite brass bail. “I consent, Tomas! Lift!”
Tomas activated *Load Share*.
The amber slate flared in Tomas’s mind with a brilliant, golden flash. A line of glowing sharp-angled force snapped between Tomas’s right shoulder and Rowan’s chest, binding their physical carriage into a single, perfectly balanced dynamic system.
In an instant, the crushing, four-hundred-pound heavy rush of the hardwood chest was cut cleanly in half. To Tomas’s right arm, the load felt like eighty pounds of sound wheat. To Rowan, it was light as a half-empty ale barrel. The balance was miraculous. Neither man felt the torque, and Tomas’s braced left arm rested safe and unstrained against his chest.
“Heave!” Tomas commanded.
With a single, easy surge of combined power, Tomas and Rowan hoisted the massive hardwood chest from the truck, swung it between them. Then they sprinted down Tanner’s Alley toward the South Ward.
Leth and the wagon drivers fell in behind them, forming a rearguard in the driving rain.
They broke out of the alley into the canal boulevard. They carried the 400-pound chest at a dead run across the Canal Bridge, heading straight for the lit up lanterns of the Public Weigh-House as the first cavalry torches appeared on the bluffs behind them.
The lawful ten minutes of Load Share ticked away with the relentless care of an iron clockwork.
Eight minutes... Nine minutes... They reached the granite steps of the Public Weigh-House in the Dyer’s Yard. Then, the golden glow faded, and the true, crushing weight of the chest returned.
Before the mercenary’s boot had even cleared the puddle in Tanner’s Alley, Leth had scooped up the crushed, flattened brass leftovers of Nessa’s sound horn from the mud. Then it dropped them into his canvas grease-bag so that not a single fragment of her craft was left behind to be mocked by Holt’s soldiers. Nessa ran directly between Tomas and Rowan. The four-hundred-pound hardwood chest glided between their timed together strides. She guided her steps by the visual rhythm of their boots splashing on the wet timber planking of the Canal Bridge and the rhythmic, low-hum tremor that the heavy chest sent through the granite curbstones into her soles. The sound world around her had been snapped away in a single blow of flanged iron. Even so, her left hand remained clamped around the oilskin strap of the evidence satchel containing Bela Tern’s copper tape and the wax transcription tablets from High Orchard Lane.
Behind the runners, at the southern bridge pillar of the Canal Bridge, the six South Ward wagon drivers under Leth’s command toppled two stacked piles of seasoned barrel-staves and an empty tar-wagon across the approach ramp. Just then, Captain Holt’s twenty lancers galloped down from the bluff road. The horses reared and skidded on the wet oak staves. Their iron shoes striking was bright orange sparks against the cobbles. Meanwhile, the wagon drivers vanished through the narrow brick wickets into the maze of Rope Walk and Dyer’s Lane. Those ninety seconds of delay at the bridgehead bought Tomas and Rowan the final three hundred yards of uphill grade needed to carry the chest inside the turf of the Lower House before the ten-minute lawful duration of Load Share expired.
The golden sharp-angled link dissolved between their shoulders on the top step of the Public Weigh-House. Then, the sudden return of four hundred pounds of dead hardwood mass drove both men’s knees two inches down. Then they made the oak cross-beams of the platform groan beneath their hobnailed boots. Tomas’s right shoulder muscle and upper back muscle burned as if scalded with lye. His breath tore through his chest in raw, steaming gasps. But the three town lead wafers of Year Forty-Two hung unbroken across the brass hasp.
With a tremendous, resounding crash that shook the flat stone slabs, Tomas and Rowan slammed the four-hundred-pound hardwood chest down onto the weighing terrace.
Above them, the dawn broke in a brilliant streak of cold, silver light, and from the surrounding streets, two hundred South Ward citizens stepped out with their clubs, ringing the terrace in an unbroken wall of defense.