The first strike against Printer’s Alley came at forty minutes past midnight. Just then, the river fog was so dense that a lantern could barely light up three cobblestones ahead. The lane was as still as an empty tomb, the only sound the distant, muffled clanking of the Stanhope presses shaking through the brick walls of Master Thorne’s works.
Tomas Reed and Sile Rook sat on wooden packing crates just inside the northern delivery doors. Sile had his oak tall body-shield leaning against his knees, its iron-shod base dug half an inch into the gap between two stone flags. Across his lap lay his thirty-year-old iron-wood hooked pruning blade. Its polished beak reflected the faint orange glow of a charcoal fire bowl set ten feet back in the hall.
Without warning, an iron crowbar bit into the seam between the heavy oak shutter and the doorframe. Screee-crunch. The sound was the sharp, violent shriek of seasoned heart-oak splintering under leveraged steel.
A second iron bar jammed into the gap four inches higher. Two heavy men on the outside leaned their full weight onto the levers, attempting to pop the lower hinge from its stonework socket. The lime mortar around the iron pintle cracked and rained down inside the threshold like dry gravel.
