Before a single boot stepped back onto the slanted stairs of the sunken castle, Tomas Reed stripped the entire salvage crew down to bone, brass, and rawhide.
The morning wind off the Weeping Delta was raw and bitter. He carried the smell of decomposing reed-beds and low marsh fog. Tomas stood on the timber staging deck outside the breached sally port. His master ledger was balanced on an upturned firkin. Beside him, Sile Rook sat on an oak bench with a pair of pincers, a coarse whetstone, and a wicker basket lined with sheepskin.
“Every nail in every boot heel comes out,” Tomas announced to the six wagon drivers and four volunteer peat-cutters standing in line. “Every iron buckle, every steel belt-clasp, every pocket-knife, every steel needle-point arrow. If you have an iron metal ring on your walking staff, leave it on the gravel. If you strike a single ferrous spark on the granite steps below, the volatile vapor weeping from sixty crates of fire-glass will detonate inside the stonework arch. There will be no wounded. There will only be a cloud of black smoke and thirty feet of marsh water filling the crater.”
Young Darrow sat on a split-log bench. He watched Sile pry the six iron hobnails from the soles of his work boots. In their place, Sile drove four-inch pegs of seasoned boxwood. He tapped them flush with an ash mallet before trimming the excess with a bronze draw-knife.
