Eighty feet above the black water of Bay Fourteen, in the cold, soot-choked darkness of an abandoned coal cellar beneath the western courtyard of the King’s Bench, Nessa Vale knelt with both knees planted upon a heap of dry hard coal slack. Her oilskin coat was streaked with black coal dust. Her ragged brown hair was pinned back behind her ears with two brass surveying needles. Pressed tightly against her right ear—her good ear—was the velvet-lined bell of her aimed silver sound tube, its narrow probe tip wedged half an inch into a split seam in the upright copper drainage stack.
Beside her, looming in the shadows of the low brick archway, stood Sile Rook. The veteran watch officer was silent as an iron statue, his massive oak tall body-shield propped against his left thigh to mask the dim yellow light of their hooded horn lantern. In his right hand, he held his heavy iron-wood hooked pruning blade, its curved, razor-sharp beak resting against the stone floor. His scarred chest, crisscrossed with the pale keloid ridges of chemical burns suffered twenty years ago in the Flood March, rose. Then he fell with slow, disciplined regularity. His dark eyes never left the narrow cellar stairs that led upward into the High court courtyard.
