Master Bram had wrapped the iron oarlocks of the kennel skiff with strips of greasy wool blanket so the wood wouldn’t thump when Luckas and Kaelen pulled against the current.
Even so, getting half a mile down the west channel in the dark took us forty minutes of slow, freezing work.
The fog sitting over the river wasn’t thick enough to hide a lantern at twenty yards, though it was damp enough to turn to white rime on our eyebrows and freeze the hem of my cloak stiff against my shins. Every ten strokes, a flat cake of grey pan-ice the size of a dining table would come drifting down out of the gloom, and I had to lean over the bow with a wooden boat-hook to push the slab aside before it scraped loud against our cedar planks.
Back in the stern, Nia sat huddled in two wool shawls with her stitched right arm strapped tight across her stomach under her coat and her good left hand wedged firmly against the wooden tiller bar.
"Red light on the left bank," Nia whispered from behind us, her teeth clicking together once before she clamped herjaw shut against the cold. "That’s the lock-keeper’s shanty below Wharf Four. Weir Island is dead ahead."
I knelt in the bow and squinted through the grey mist.
Rising out of the black water a hundred yards downstream was a low, humped spit of mud and willow scrub wedged into the fork where the canal spillway met the main river. At the northern tip of the island, built right out over the stone weir wall on tarred oak pilings, stood the Old Glassworks.
The factory had gone bankrupt ten years ago when the coal tax went up. Its two sixty-foot brick bottle-kilns stuck up into the night sky like broken teeth, their round domes half-collapsed, surrounded by a sprawling corrugated-iron blowing shed with half its roof panes missing.
"Hold the oars," I breathed, touching Luckas’s knee as the current carried us into the black shadow under the stone weir wall.
The water coming over the weir steps fifty yards upstream made a steady, hollow rushing noise—loud enough to cover the bump of our bow touching the slime-covered timber pilings under the blowing shed’s rotting loading dock.
Kaelen reached up, hooked a rusted iron mooring ring with one hand, and tied the skiff’s painter rope with a quick slip-knot that Nia could pull loose with one yank if she had to shove off in a hurry.
"No lanterns showing on the canal side," Kaelen whispered, looking up through the gaps in the rotten dock planks above our heads. "Though there’s smoke coming out of the small chimney on the annealing room. Peat smoke. Somebody lit a grate inside within the last hour to keep warm."
I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out the heavy brass single-shot flare pistol Master Bram had loaded for us, and laid it across Nia’s lap beside a short iron belaying pin.
"Keep the boat hooked under this outer piling," I told her quietly, leaning close so my voice wouldn’t carry past the splash of the weir. "You’re right under the floorboards of the packing shed here. If you hear more than three crossbows go off upstairs—or if anyone comes down the west bank toward the water who isn’t us—pull the slip-knot, push out into the river current, and put that red flare straight up over the channel."
"I know my job, Lieutenant," Nia whispered back, wrapping her left fingers around the checkered wooden grip of the flare gun and resting the barrel across her knee. "Just don’t take all night. My feet are blocks of wood."
Kaelen went up the ladder first.
The iron rungs bolted to the main timber piling were crusted with river ice and dried gull droppings, though Kaelen climbed them without a single scrape of his boot soles, lifting a loose floorboard at the back of the dark packing shed and slipping through like smoke.
I went up behind him, my bastard sword strapped tight across my back so the scabbard chape wouldn’t hit the iron rungs, with Luckas bringing up the rear.
Inside the packing shed, the smell of old soot, wet river silt, and cold lime hit the back of my throat.
And the floor was a nightmare.
Everywhere the roof had leaked over the last ten years, wooden crates had rotted apart, spilling thousands of pounds of cullet—jagged green and brown bottle-glass scraps meant for the melting pots—across the concrete floor in ankle-deep drifts.
Luckas put his left boot down in the dark and froze instantly as a half-melted green glass jar crunched softly under his heel like dry ice.
Kaelen’s hand touched both our shoulders in the pitch dark, pointing up toward the iron catwalk that ran along the brick wall fifteen feet above the glass piles.
It took us six minutes to climb a rusted iron maintenance ladder that would have taken ten seconds in daylight, testing every rung with our thumbs first to make sure the bolts weren’t rusted through. When we bellied out onto the narrow iron walkway under the eaves of the main blowing hall, we could see the whole factory floor laid out below us through the broken roof skylights.
In the center of the vast brick room stood two massive circular melting furnaces made of firebrick, each twenty feet across, with eight arched working holes around their sides like giant beehives.
Right between the two cold furnaces, somebody had cleared a ten-foot circle of broken glass with a shovel and lit a small heap of dry peat bricks inside an overturned iron wheelbarrow.
Six men were standing or sitting around the red glow of the peat fire.
They weren’t dock thugs like Grist, and they weren’t wearing the uniform grey armor of the festival commandos. They wore heavy oilskin river coats over dark wool sweaters, thick leather greaves buckled to the knee, and carried short, heavy Viganator repeating crossbows with the steel prods cocked and six-bolt magazines slotted in on top.
Two more men weren’t on the floor at all—they were perched twenty feet away from us on the opposite brick gallery above the east door, resting their crossbows on the iron rail so they had a clean line of fire down into the circle by the wheelbarrow.
And moored outside the open river doors on the west side of the building—where a stone slipway led down into the deep water below the weir—sat a long, low-slung steam launch with its brass boiler muffled in wet canvas sacks and a thin wisp of white steam hissing quietly from its underwater exhaust pipe.
"Eight of them," Luckas breathed against the back of my wool collar, so softly I felt the warmth of his breath rather than heard it. "And a steam boat with the pressure already up."
Down by the peat fire, the leader of the team—a tall, square-shouldered man with a heavy grey cavalry mustache and a sheepskin cap pulled down to his ears—pulled a silver pocket watch out of his oilskin coat and tilted it toward the red coals.
"Eight-fifty," the mustached leader said in flat Viganator highland dialect. "He’s got ten minutes before we pull the plug."
One of the younger men sitting on an overturned glass-crucible spat into the broken cullet. "Still don’t see why we’re waiting on the fat bastard at all, Sergeant. The Friday sleigh from the school never showed up at the bridge, and Marta hasn’t signaled from the West House since Thursday night. The school’s blown."
"Marta’s job was the school; our job is the pass," the sergeant replied, checking the iron string-latch on his repeating crossbow with his thumb. "Colonel Hadeon didn’t deal with Marta directly—he dealt with Lorenzo’s people at the ministry. As long as Hadeon brings the stress tables for Gallery Four tonight, we don’t care what happened to the clerk on the island."
"And Hadeon?" the younger man asked. "We still taking him down to the schooner at Three Bays? He weighs twenty stone; he’ll sink the launch."
The sergeant gave a short, dry snort, sliding a heavy ten-inch trench knife in and out of his boot top to make sure it was loose.
"The schooner sailed on the morning tide," the sergeant said calmly. "Orders came down from the factor on Market Street at six o’clock: take the oilskin portfolio out of the Colonel’s hands, give him the envelope of cut newspaper to keep him quiet for five seconds while you check the red stamps, and put two bolts through his ribs before he opens the flap. Drop him in the weir pool with an iron grate wired to his ankles. By the time the ice breaks in March, the river eels won’t leave enough of him for the Imperial Guard to identify his buttons."
Beside me on the narrow iron catwalk, Luckas’s hand tightened on the iron rail.
If they put two crossbow bolts into Hadeon’s chest the second he handed over the papers, Corvus wouldn’t have a witness for Sunday morning—and Lord Lorenzo would walk out of the citadel gates on Monday with a clean bill of health while his cousins opened Sospurro’s borders.
I looked across the dark roof trusses toward the opposite brick gallery where the two lookouts were perched with their crossbows aimed at the east door.
I tapped Kaelen’s wrist twice in the dark, then pointed two fingers at the two lookouts across the hall.
You take the gallery.
Kaelen looked at the forty-foot span of rusted iron roof-tie rods running above the cold brick furnaces between our catwalk and theirs, nodded once, and began pulling himself silently up into the roof rafters hand-over-hand without using his feet at all, his black tunic vanishing against the soot-blackened corrugated iron ceiling.
I touched Luckas’s shoulder and pointed down at the two massive brick beehive furnaces sitting on either side of the peat fire.
"When Hadeon walks in, he’s coming through the east door under those lookouts," I whispered into Luckas’s ear, barely moving my lips. "We can’t jump down from fifteen feet onto broken glass without every gun in the room turning on us before our boots hit the floor. Wait until Kaelen clears the upper rail—then we go down the brick chimney ladder on the back of Furnace Two and come out through the ash pit right behind the sergeant."
"And the six repeating crossbows?" Luckas breathed.
"Don’t let them aim," I said.
Down below, out on the frozen canal towpath beyond the east doors, the faint, rhythmic clop-clop of a single hired hackney horse trotting through the slush echoed across the water, stopping fifty yards short of the weir bridge.
Around the peat fire, the Viganator sergeant kicked a pile of broken green bottle-glass over the glowing embers in the wheelbarrow, plunging the center of the floor into deep gloom lit only by the pale grey starlight coming through the broken skylights overhead.
The five men on the floor didn’t hide behind the furnaces; three of them stepped back into the shadows behind the brick pillars with their crossbows raised at waist height, while the sergeant and the younger man stood in the cleared circle waiting.
Two minutes later, footsteps crunched heavily on the gravel outside the east entrance.
The sliding wooden door creaked back two feet, and Colonel Hadeon stepped inside, breathing like a winded carriage horse.
He wasn’t wearing his crimson-collared War Ministry uniform coat tonight. He had on a voluminous black wool civilian cloak with the hood pulled up over his bald head and a silk scarf wrapped around his double chin, though anyone who had seen him at the Solstice banquet yesterday would have recognized his round stomach and the heavy gold signet ring flashing on his ungloved left hand as he wiped sweat off his forehead.
He took three steps into the dark factory—and stopped dead as his polished riding boots crunched loudly on a drift of broken green glass.
"Marta?" Hadeon called out, his voice cracking slightly in the high, echoing brick hall as he peered nervously toward the dark bulk of the furnaces. "Is that you? Why aren’t the lamps lit? I told Lorenzo’s man I wasn’t walking out on the timber dock in the dark!"
"Stay right where you are, Colonel," the Viganator sergeant said, stepping out half a pace from between the two brick beehives with a thick brown manila envelope held in his left hand. "Marta’s packing the baggage sleighs up at the school. I have your bank draft on the Sfirt exchange right here. Do you have the archive copy for Whispering Pass?"
Hadeon squinted through the gloom at the sergeant’s sheepskin cap and oilskin coat, taking a nervous half-step back toward the door. "You weren’t at the Tuesday drop. Where is the steam launch?"
"Moored right behind me at the west slip, three minutes from the open channel," the sergeant replied smoothly, gesturing with his thumb toward the open river doors where the faint hiss of the steam boiler echoed over the weir water. "Give me the blue linen sheets so I can check the Corps of Engineers seal, and you can be sitting under a canvas cabin roof with a bottle of brandy before nine-fifteen."
While the sergeant spoke, Kaelen and I weren’t watching Hadeon.
Luckas and I had climbed silently down the rusted iron rungs bolted to the back chimney flue of Furnace Two, keeping the twenty-foot thickness of the round brick beehive between us and the men by the wheelbarrow. We crouched inside the arched brick mouth of the cold ash-tunnel on the blind side of the furnace, ten feet behind the sergeant’s left heel.
Up in the dark roof trusses thirty feet above the floor, a faint, barely audible thump sounded against the bricks of the eastern gallery—like a sack of flour settling onto wood—followed a second later by Kaelen’s pale hand reaching down over the iron railing to catch a dropped repeating crossbow before it could clatter onto the glass below.