At sixth bell of the morning, the heavy bronze bell of Saint Jude’s Parish Church began to ring—not with the slow peal of a funeral or the merry peal of a wedding, but with the rapid, urgent, double-stroke chime of the public defense alarm.
Within twenty minutes, the narrow cobblestone square before the church was packed with two hundred working men. Ditchers in mud-stained canvas breeches, bricklayers with lime-burned hands, lightermen with tarred aprons, and coal-heavers with shoulders blackened by dust.
Tomas Reed stood upon the stone steps of the market cross, his ash pack frame resting beside him, his braced arm supported by his sling.
Beside him stood Hester Quill. It held the official emergency warrant signed by Chief Justice Lord Maren. It was stamped with the huge green wax seal of the King’s Bench.
“Men of the Lower Wards!” Tomas’s voice was not the high, polished rhetoric of a nobleman. It was the rough, grounded deep of a back-door porter who had walked their alleys for twenty years. “The Great Sky-Spire is tilting fourteen inches over your roofs. The High Engineers hid the rotten stone. They hid an illegal sewage channel that has hollowed out an underground lake sixty feet beneath the cathedral.”
