The fog over the Deep Anchor Anchorage didn’t rise from the sea. It crept down from the coal-wharves, thick with slack-water bilge, rotting bladderwrack, and unwashed animal fat.
It was past the third glass of the middle watch. At that hour, the Royal Shipyards of Crown-Reach usually lay under a sullen quiet, broken only by the suck of the ebb tide against the timber piles. But on Slipway Four. There, the wooden hull of the three-masted merchantman Sea-Gull sat wedged in her launching cradle, there was no quiet.
Tomas Reed stood twenty paces back in the shadow of the saw-shed, his boots sunk into the cold sea silt lining the timber skids. The dampness soaked through the frieze wool of his coat. His left forearm throbbed with a grinding pulse. Beneath the buckled calfskin brace, the scarred tendon sheath where broken glass had torn through gristle twenty months before felt stiff as dried cowhide. He worked his thumb against his forefinger, feeling the gristle drag over the forearm bone. Sixty-five percent grip. He had rubbed the joint with sheep fat and oil of wintergreen before stepping into the dark, but the salt frost searched out every damaged fiber.
Beside him, Nessa Vale crouched near an oak timber baulk, her oilskin mantle pulled tight. Her brass sound hearing horn was pressed to her right ear, its flared bell angled toward the foundation wooden support posts of the slip. Her gray eyes remained fixed on the yellow ring of animal fat light…
