For two hundred years, the Royal Shipyards of Crown-Reach had lived under an unbroken drumbeat of heavy-duty violence. Twenty-pound sledges driving copper drift-bolts through seasoned oak, two-man pit-saws chewing through green pine, white-hot iron cooled in salt water, and draymen cursing mules across greasy cobbles. Even on feast days, the pitch kettles bubbled over brick hearths. It sent yellow sulfur smoke into the harbor mist.
On the morning following the ox-horn blast, the silence of the yard was heavier than falling timber.
Tomas Reed stood upon the granite terrace of the West Quay. Cold harbor air, clean of wood smoke for the first time in memory, tasted of salt water and wet silt. Below him, the eight slipways of Crown-Reach dropped into the dark water of the Deep Anchor Anchorage, empty of movement.
The pitch kettles were cold.
Along the caulkers’ terrace, forty iron caldrons sat black and dead over arched brick fireboxes. The fires had been drawn before midnight and the ashes put out. Inside the caldrons, pine resin, animal fat, and coal tar had cooled into glassy skins of dull black glass.
Beyond the kettles, the dry-dock steam pumps had ceased pounding.
Usually, the sky engines shook the stonework day and night, sucking four thousand gallons a minute from the graving docks. Now, the copper safety valves hung slack and the boiler doors swung wide over cold grates. In the stone sump beneath the pump house, the tide crept upward, lapping against the lead-blackened strakes of the quarantined…
