The impact came before the bells of Saint Jude had finished their third stroke.
It didn’t sound like thunder or the ringing report of an iron anvil falling from a derrick. It was a heavy, choking thump that shuddered through the flat stone slabs of Copper Lane, rattling the tin tea mugs on the back shelf of the South Tenement Claims Office. A second later, the sound of tearing cedar shingles drifted through the casement. It was followed by the powdery hiss of crushed lime settling over wet gravel.
Tomas Reed didn’t leap from his stool. At thirty-eight, a man who had spent fourteen years carrying what town councils preferred to forget didn’t jump at sudden noises in the capital. He kept his right hand flat upon the scrubbed pine boards of his sorting table, step by step working his fingers through their morning routine. Thumb to index, middle, ring, and little finger.
The tendon sheath across his right forearm pulled taut, white and rigid as a salted codline. The scar where broken glass had cut the flexor tendon outside Bellwether twenty years ago had turned into a thickened cord of gristle. On damp mornings when river mist hung cold in the alleys of Crown-Reach, the gristle tightened until his hand felt like a wooden clamp. He pressed his thumb into the notch above his wrist, breathing slowly until the dull ache smoothed into workable numbness.
