The net-shed at the mouth of the Black Ditch smelled of pickled herring salt water, rancid neatsfoot oil, and wet peat smoke.
Jarek Thorne didn’t rise when Dunley tapped the iron latch-ring three times. He sat on an overturned salt tub beside a small fire bowl of sea-coal, whetting the curved steel blade of a diver’s hacking knife on an oily slate hone. His shoulders were wide and thick as an ox yoke, warped by twenty years of hauling iron sounding chains and walking under sixty pounds of underwater bronze. Around both wrists, deep circular scars from the brass sealing rings of diving cuffs showed white against his leathery skin. On the timber bench behind him lay his gear: oiled canvas breeches, a bundle of animal fat-greased leather hoses. A pair of sounding leads wrapped in braided horsehair line.
“Dunley,” Thorne said, his voice a low scrape that sounded as if he had swallowed harbor silt in his youth. “You brought strangers into the Ditch past the curfew bell.”
“They aren’t strangers, Jarek,” Dunley said. He stepped aside so the dim glow of the fire bowl fell across Tomas’s ash-wood pack frame. “This is Tomas Reed, Master Tax clerk of the Imperial Circuit, and Nessa Vale, chief land-mapper of the Lower River works. They have the Circuit Court mandate to audit the casualty rolls of the High Sea-court.”
