The rain ceased by mid-morning, replaced by a cold, greasy fog that rolled in from the river, trapping the smoke of Crown-Reach beneath a yellow-gray vault of cloud.
While Hester and Olla remained in the loft drafting the motion of immunity, Tomas and Olla walked eastward. He crossed the narrow stone under-road drain that separated Printer’s Alley from the district known as the Charred Quarters.
Here, the stonework changed with brutal suddenness.
Forty-one years before, the Great Fire of Crown-Reach had started in an oil-refiner’s warehouse on the river quay and burned east for five days, consuming four entire wards of timber and straw roof before blowing itself out against the stone foundations of the King’s Bench. What had risen in its place was not the grand stone boulevard promised by the royal proclamations of the era. But an improvised, choking maze of four- and six-story apartments built from green, unseasoned pine and salvaged timber, their exteriors coated with cheap black pitch to resist the rot.
The buildings leaned toward one another across alleys so narrow that two draymen carrying flour sacks couldn’t pass without their shoulders touching. Overhead, crude timber struts spanned the gaps between fourth-floor window frames, propping up leaning walls like crutches on a crippled soldier. The ground beneath their boots was not paved stone. It was a packed layer of black ash, coal dust, and crushed oyster shells that smelled faintly of scorch even after forty winters of rain.
