The Admiralty High Court of Crown-Reach smelled of wet oakum, salt-crusted stone, and old rancid animal fat.
Rain drummed a relentless rhythm against the high mullioned lancets, where salt spray from the outer roads had dried into milky streaks across the leaded panes. A cold draft blew through the timber gallery. It carried the smell of harbor silt and stale bilgewater churned up by the morning ebb tide. Along the back benches of the gallery sat four hundred men and women in stiff, salt water-stained woolens—the harbor dredgers, diving tenders, grapple-handlers, and the widows of the deep-channel gangs. Their knuckles were thick and scarred by hemp friction and copper wire. Their eyes were sunken from years of squinting into the cold, turbid gloom of the harbor bed. And several older divers sat with their heads cocked at awkward angles, their ears permanently deafened by the crushing water pressure of the deep anchorage.
Tomas Reed stood at the center bar, his boots planted firmly upon the worn limestone flags. Beneath his buckled calfskin brace, the tight seam of scar tissue pulled across his right forearm bone, cold and aching in the autumn damp. Step by step, he touched his thumb to his index finger, middle finger, ring, and little finger in set. That forced the stiff tendon to yield against the dull pushback of gristle. Sixty-five percent grip. It had held iron trace chains and salvage winches. It would hold what remained of the morning’s business.
