By the seventh hour of the morning, Crown-Reach was flooded not with river silt, but with ink. The spreading network planned by Wren and carried out by forty young lightermen and courier apprentices was a masterclass in working-class logistics. He used the ancient, underground drainage under-road drains that ran beneath the city’s streets to bypass every police checkpoint.
While the City Watch guarded the main thoroughfares, small boys with patched trousers and oilcloth satchels emerged from storm grates, cellar trapdoors, and churchyard coal chutes across all eight wards of the capital. Each boy carried fifty broadsheets. It was wrapped in wax-cloth to protect them from gutter damp, delivering them directly to the places where working people gathered before the morning shifts began.
Tomas Reed stood at the corner of the Corn Market, watching the broadsheets circulate. A bundle had been pasted to the stone pillar of the Market Cross with flour paste. Thirty grain wagon drivers, bakers, and flour merchants stood around it three ranks deep, their breath steaming in the crisp morning air as an apprentice miller read the text aloud in a strong, clear voice.
‘...And under the Ledger of Year Zero,’ the boy read, tracing the printed lines with a flour-white finger, ‘the sum of seventy-two thousand silver crowns, being the collected flood-defense escrows of the Seven River Communities, was passed under Privy Voucher 414 directly into the private accounts of Alderman Lucian Vane and the Trade ring of Iron Dikes. Meanwhile, the water gate gates at…
