At eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, the great bells of Crown-Reach began to toll all at once—not the rapid, clanging alarm of a city fire, but the slow, solemn, majestic rhythm of a state funeral. Across seven parish wards, from the river wharves to the north castle walls, twenty church towers joined their voices: TONG... TONG... TONG. And with every stroke of the bells, the working people of the metropolis stepped out of their houses into the autumn rain.
They didn’t carry weapons. They carried no swords, no cudgels, no bows, and no torches. In their left hands, five thousand working men, women, and elders carried a round loaf of dry, coarse rye bread—the daily sustenance of the working hearth. In their right hands, held high above their heads against the gray sky, they carried the crisp royal broadsheet of the Forty-Eight Crafts. Its black ink shone with careful truth.
Tomas Reed led the procession. He wore his worn charcoal-gray wool tunic, his heavy cowhide boots. His oiled leather porter harness cross-strapped over his chest. Upon his ash-wood pack frame, resting securely against his lower-back spine, sat the lead document metal tube containing the Founding Charter of Anno 242. His left forearm was held rigid in its calfskin brace, the iron buckle gleaming, his scarred fingers resting loosely on his cart driver belt. Beside him walked Hester Quill in her dark scholar’s gown, her reading glasses perched on her nose. It carried the approved duplicate ledger of Aaron Coram’s confession…
