The red cross was painted with a brush made of stiff hog bristles, dipped in a mixture of rendered sheep fat, lamp soot, and red brick-dust.
It was nearly three feet high, slapped diagonally across the double oak doors of the print shop. The grease had soaked deep into the dry, unpainted wood. That left a dark, oily halo that wouldn’t wash out with water. It was the “Strike-Cross”—the ancient sign of the Guild Enforcement League, used for two hundred years in Crown-Reach to mark a shop whose owner was unsafe to economic starvation, vandalism, or fire.
Corben Vane stood in the alley in his shirtsleeves, his broken glasses hanging from his neck by their copper wire, his face gray as unbaked dough. In his hand he held a bucket of lye water and a stiff coir brush. But the grease had already pierced the grain.
“They did it before the fourth watch,” Vane said, his voice flat, deadened by forty years of capital fatigue. “The night watchman on the corner saw three men in leather aprons carrying an animal fat pot. He walked the other way. Two silver pennies to look at the stars while the League marks the target.”
