The rain began at the second hour after midnight, two full days ahead of Renn Tal’s air-pressure forecast. It didn’t fall as an honest autumn shower. It came down as a cold, gray sheet driven by an easterly gale off the drowned fens, drumming against the slate roofs of Bellwether like lead shot thrown across iron plates.
Tomas Reed stood at the high window of Bera’s bakery attic, his shoulder braced against the damp brick door post. Below him in the alley, the cobblestones were already sunk under two inches of greasy, yellow-brown runoff that carried potato peelings, rotten straw, and coal dust toward the choked gutter grates. Across the narrow lane, the timber foundations of the lower apartments creaked with a rhythmic, sickening groan as the waterlogged clay shifted beneath their footings.
He reached beneath his coarse wool coat to adjust the calfskin strap supporting his left wrist. The skin over his inner forearm felt tight, hot, and swollen, throbbing with a steady, dull pulse that matched the rhythm of his heart. For four hours, he had been doing the daily tendon stretches Mirelle’s hospice healer had prescribed—thumb to index, thumb to middle, thumb to ring, thumb to little finger. The gristle inside his wrist felt like a dry cord of hemp dragged through gravel. But he forced the fourth repetition until his knuckles touched his palm.
‘The high weir gauge at Gate Four dropped six inches between midnight and dawn,’ Nessa Vale said from the low drafting table behind him. She spoke loudly and with sharp enunciation, compensating for the drumming roar of the storm that her damaged left ear could register only as a hollow, buzzing shaking. Her oilskin traveler’s coat lay draped over a flour barrel. It steamed gently near the iron chimney pipe of Bera’s bread oven.
‘Six inches of water level?’ Tomas asked, turning his head so she could read his mouth in the amber glow of the animal fat lamp.
‘Six inches of load-bearing bending,’ Nessa corrected. She tapped her bone-tipped measuring tongs against a sheet of heavy drafting thick parchment stretched over the flour bin. ‘The central oak support post is bowing outward into the channel. The timber is weeping black sap where the iron straps bite into the grain. The silt behind the trash-rack has turned to liquid grease under the rain. Four million cubic feet of river-bed mud, Tomas. If the timber snaps, the high-pressure head will blow the iron water gate plates straight into the low streets like cannon shot.’
A heavy thud shook the floorboards as Bera climbed the narrow attic stairs. He carried a battered pewter tray with three clay pot mugs of chicory broth and a loaf of coarse rye bread still warm from the hearth. The baker was fifty, broad-hipped and red-faced from thirty years over the peel, her apron dusted with white barley meal. She set the tray on an empty lard tub, wiped her flour-whitened palms on her hips. Then she looked out the rain-streaked window.
‘The water is in my basement storage already,’ Bera said, her voice dry and unsentimental. ‘Three barrels of coarse meal are floating in six inches of river backwash. I had my boys hoist the salt casks onto the ceiling floor beams with cart driver’s tackle. If the city gates close the floodwalls, who pays for the spoiled flour?’
‘The Town Relief Reserve is liable under the Charter of Year Twelve,’ Tomas answered. He took one of the steaming mugs in his sound right hand. The chicory was bitter and scorched, tasting of very thirsty rye root. But the heat went down into his chest like a blessing. ‘Hester filed the formal Notice of Impending Loss with the bond court yesterday. If your storage is flooded by council diversion rather than natural river overflow, the guild owes forty silver coins per barrel, payable within thirty days of the water receding.’
‘They’ll pay in scrip,’ Bera muttered, tearing the rye bread into three equal chunks with her thumb. ‘Scrip signed by an under-clerk that the grain merchants won’t take for seed barley. But at least the paper gives me a stick to hit the court guard with when he comes for the tenement tax.’ She paused, chewing slowly, her sharp eyes studying Tomas’s sling. ‘Can you carry anything with that arm, lad?’
‘I can carry a pencil,’ Tomas said. ‘And I can check the seals on your flour barrels before the barge moves them.’
From the alley below came the sharp, metal clang of iron chains and the hollow wet splash of heavy oars. Eren Moss had brought three of Reed Bank’s shallow-draft freight punts up the flooded ditch of the Dyers’ Canal, using poles to fend off floating fence posts and dead dog carcasses. On the foredeck of the lead barge, an iron fire bowl burned with damp pine chips. It sent a plume of oily white smoke into the driving rain.
Tomas and Nessa dropped the outside stair into the yard. The water was cold enough to numb Tomas’s toes through the oiled leather of his cart driver boots, the river-bed silt sucking at his heel-plates with a hollow wet gasp at every stride. In the narrow lane, twenty families from the lower apartments stood in the freezing downpour, huddled beneath greasy oilcloth tarpaulins and soaked horse blankets. They didn’t have carts. They carried what they could lift in wicker laundry hampers, iron pots tied with hemp string, and canvas sacks of dry bedding.
Eren Moss stood in the bow of his punt, his long ash pole braced against the granite stonework of Bera’s bakery wall. He was sixty, his face brown and creased like an old saddle from forty years on the river, wearing a seal-skin cap tied down over his ears. He was Emmet Reed’s first cousin, born on the reed-beds before the great breach, his hands knotted with arthritis from handling cold thick ship rope ropes.
‘We can take forty crates on the three boats, Tomas,’ Eren called out. He wiped rain from his gray beard with the back of his woolen mitten. ‘Any more and the boat sides will take water when we hit the current at the West Bridge. We take the dry goods and the bedding first. The people can walk the towpath to the hill hospice. Venn has the garden sheds laid with clean straw.’
‘No cargo moves without a receipt, Eren,’ Tomas said, pulling his waterproof leather pouch from his hip and balancing it against his chest with his left elbow. ‘If a woman puts her family blankets on your barge, she gets a yellow slip with her name, the basket mark, and your boat’s registration number. If the cargo gets wet, the Lower House compensation fund covers the loss. If it vanishes in the dark, you account for it at the dock.’
Eren gave a short, hard grunt that was half a laugh. ‘Still your father’s boy. Emmet wouldn’t hoist a sack of oats without checking the miller’s notch twice. Pass the slips, then. We’ve got two hours before the flood tide turns the canal into a millrace.’
For the next ninety minutes, Tomas stood in the freezing water gate of the alley, writing receipt slips with a dry bone metal pen pressed against waxed carbon paper. Meanwhile, Nessa checked the draught of each punt with her brass surveying rod. A washerwoman named Morna pressed a cracked wicker hamper into the barge crew’s hands. Then, Tomas handed her the duplicate yellow slip and told her quietly, ‘The walls are mortared with lime, Morna. Keep the yellow paper and don’t sell it to any street speculator.’ She nodded once, clutched the slip inside her sodden shawl. Then she turned toward the hill road with her children.
Across the flooded ditch, Sile Rook appeared through the sheets of gray rain. The veteran watch officer was wrapped in a huge cloak of boiled wool that smelled strongly of damp sheep fat. He carried an eight-foot iron-wood hooked pruning blade across his right shoulder, his left arm clamped over a sealed leather dispatch case stamped with the red eagle of the City Watch.
He stepped into the knee-deep water without hesitating, his scarred face grim, the puckered keloid tissue along his neck glistening with rain.
‘Holt has filed an emergency injunction with the High Judge,’ Sile said, leaning close to Tomas so his voice wouldn’t carry over the storm. ‘He claims the orchard channel is his private freehold under the Patent of Year Sixteen. His private retainers have locked the orchard gates with forged chain. If Thess’s crews bring their shovels within ten paces of his stone boundary wall, his court guard has orders to read the Riot Act and arrest every carter for armed trespass.’
Tomas wiped the rain from his thick parchment ledger and tucked the bone metal pen into his belt. ‘Did the High Judge sign the writ?’
‘Not yet,’ Sile said. ‘Wren is sitting on the judge’s front bench with six watchmen, demanding an immediate hearing on the flood danger. But Holt has money in every clerk’s pocket between here and the High Citadel. If the judge delays his ruling until noon, the storm will do Holt’s work for him. The water gate will burst. The orchard will stay bone dry while this alley drowns under six feet of silt.’
Tomas looked up at the sky. The rain was thickening, turning the light into a dark, greasy twilight. Through the soles of his boots, the shaking of the pool timbers was growing faster, sharper. A high, whining shudder that meant the wood had reached its elastic limit.
‘Tell Thess to bring the teams to the orchard gate anyway,’ Tomas said, his voice flat and hard. ‘Nessa has the original survey plates from thirty-nine years ago. The orchard was unsafe for public drainage before Holt ever planted an apple tree. If his court guard wants to read the Riot Act, he can read it to sixty thousand people standing in the mud with shovels in their hands.’