Printer’s Alley was barely eight feet wide. That dark limestone deep gap ran behind the Tanner’s Guild where three-story timber apartments leaned toward each other until their roof edges nearly touched overhead. The air in the lane tasted of damp coal smoke, rancid mutton fat. The sharp, oily tang of boiling linseed oil and lampblack. For sixty years, the pressroom of Master Kael the Elder had operated behind the heavy iron-studded oak door of Number Seven, printing town ordinances, shipping manifests, and burial hymns for the lower parishes.
Tomas stepped across the threshold, his iron heel-plates scraping the stone floor. Sile Rook entered behind him, right away dropping the three-inch oak cross-timber into its wrought-iron wall brackets. Meanwhile, Nessa Vale took her station at the narrow casement window overlooking the lane, her aimed sound horn clamped to her ear.
Inside the workshop, the heat from two massive brick stoves was intense. It filled the long room with the pungent aroma of drying rag paper and heated printers’ ink. Along the center aisle stood two massive common screw presses, their heavy uprights carved from seasoned heart-oak fourteen inches square, banded with blackened iron straps. The massive wooden screws, turned by eight-foot levers of polished ash, hung poised above the stone beds. Their bronze pressure plattens shone in the firelight.
