Baron Cedric of Crag-Foot sat upon his obese white palfrey like a sack of damp oats tied to a sheep.
His double chin rested heavily upon a collar of rabbit fur that smelled strongly of rancid lard and clove water. Behind him, twelve mounted retainers in tarnished iron pot-helmets leaned on notched polearms. It stared hungrily at the rows of fresh cedar cabins, the roaring grist mill, and the clean stone bridge.
“One thousand two hundred gold sovereigns,” Cedric repeated, puffing his cheeks. “Not a copper less. You have built an unpermitted stone arch across the ravine of Crag-Foot. You have diverted fifty wagons of commercial timber from my sovereign toll-gate. And you harbor two hundred escaped bondmen who owe harvest tithes to my barony.”
Giles Croft stepped off the ladder of the bathhouse terrace and adjusted his brass slide rule.
The morning sun reflected off his round glasses. Behind him walked Lady Millicent. It carried a heavy brass-bound folio ledger. Captain Kenneth Drake, his ten-foot iron-shod pacing rod balanced lightly in the crook of his elbow.
“State your jurisdictional power,” Giles said in his standard dry tone.
Cedric blinked, his piggy eyes darting across Giles’s plain wool coat. “Jurisdictional what? I’m Baron Cedric, hereditary toll-lord of the Crag-Foot defile. My ancestors held the iron chain across this valley before your grandfather was born.”
“An old family claim isn’t a legal instrument,” Giles replied. “Under the Royal Municipal Transit City law, Section Forty-Two, a toll collector on a royal post road must present three documents upon demand: an active baronial charter of easement, an annual roadbed upkeep certificate issued by the Ministry of Public Works. A tuned standard gauge.”
He pointed a gloved finger at the saddle-bow of Cedric’s lead sergeant.
“That lead hoop hanging from your man’s saddle,” Giles said. “Is that your official cart-gauge?”
Cedric puffed up his chest, a greasy smirk spreading across his lips. “It’s the ancient ring of Crag-Foot. Any cart whose wheel-hubs exceed the breadth of that hoop pays double heavy tax for road damage. A fair and venerable law.”
“Bring it here,” Giles said.
Kenneth stepped forward. He didn’t draw his sword. He simply extended his ten-foot iron rod between the legs of Cedric’s palfrey. The horse took one look at the iron shoe, snorted nervously, and backed two paces into the mud.
“Hand it over, sergeant,” Kenneth said softly.
The lead sergeant looked at Kenneth’s scarred face, swallowed hard. Then he unhooked the circular lead hoop. He dropped it into Kenneth’s hand. Kenneth tossed it onto Giles’s drafting table with a dull thud.
Giles pulled a set of hardened steel fine measuring tongs and his approved brass rule from his vest pocket.
He applied the measuring tongs jaws to the inner width of the hoop. He measured the level width. Then he rotated the hoop ninety degrees and measured the upright width.
He checked his pocket notebook and looked up.
“This rig is an intentional fraud,” Giles said flatly.
Cedric’s face shifted from smug condescension to mottled purple. “How dare you. That ring was blessed by the Bishop of Dunwall.”
“Then the Bishop of Dunwall was complicit in commercial extortion,” Giles said without raising his voice. “An royal wagon gauge is defined by the Weights and Measures Mandate of 388 as exactly sixty-six inches inner width, with a circular limit of plus or minus one-sixteenth of an inch. Your hoop is sixty-two inches horizontally and fifty-nine inches vertically.”
He tapped the bottom curve of the lead ring.
“The lead has been beaten with a peen hammer along the lower rim to deform it into an oval,” Giles said. “Every standard royal freight wagon built within the last century has a hub-width of sixty-four inches. By reducing your gauge by four inches, you ensure that one hundred percent of legal traffic fails the test and incurs your double penalty.”
Millicent opened her brass-bound ledger with a sharp snap that echoed across the forum.
“Also,” Millicent announced, adjusting her glasses with an icy smile, “we have consulted the Royal Land-tax Roll of the Western Marches. I draw your attention to folio forty-six, paragraph four.”
She turned the thick parchment leaf toward Cedric.
“The original toll patent was granted to your great-grandfather in the year 342,”
Millicent adjusted her glasses. “It carried the explicit condition that the house of Crag-Foot maintain a gravel macadam surface, twelve feet wide, with adequate ditching and stone under-road drains. Failure to maintain the roadbed for three in a row seasons incurs an immediate lapse of all toll rights.”
Millicent looked up, her blue eyes colder than winter frost.
“Your toll road is currently a loose peat bog with an average mud depth of fourteen inches,”
Millicent looked straight at Cedric. “In the last twelve months, three commercial grain wagons have broken axles in your ruts. The Ministry revoked your patent sixty-two years ago. You have been collecting secret revenue on an unclassified dirt track.”
Cedric’s hands trembled on his velvet reins. “Paper. Dead ink on dried skin. The law is what the sword says it’s. I have twelve lances behind me, woman.”
Kenneth Drake took two slow, measured steps forward.
The ten-foot pacing rod shifted in his grip. The iron shoe rested dead center on Cedric’s left stirrup iron, pinning the fat man’s foot against the horse’s flank.
“Twelve lances,” Kenneth murmured. His voice dropped into the quiet rhythm of a veteran sergeant counting corpses. “And behind us, we have sixty quarrymen who can split a boulder with a hand-mallet. We have fifty conscripts who spent the winter learning how to shoot through arrow slits. And we have two Blunderbore under-road drain cleaners mounted on the gatehouse.”
Kenneth looked up into Cedric’s sweating face.
“Would you like to see how the Lord Master builder cleans an under-road drain, Baron?”
Cedric choked on his breath. He looked past Kenneth’s shoulder.
Up on the newly cured concrete gate stronghold, Master Borin Bronze-Lung was leaning casually over the low roof wall. He held a glowing sulfur slow-match. Beside the dwarf sat the flared bronze bell of the Blunderbore, pointed straight down the centerline of the Cardo Maximus.
The twelve mounted retainers took one look at the flared muzzle, glanced at each other. Then he backed their horses four paces into the ditch.
“You threaten a lord of the realm?” Cedric stammered, sweat pouring down his jowls.
“I don’t threaten,” Giles said, closing his notebook. “I arbitrate. Under Section Eighty-Four of the Transit Code, running an unlisted gauge carries a penalty of four hundred and fifty gold sovereigns, payable to the nearest town treasury. Plus, the road we have built across the southern gully is situated entirely on allodial crown land granted under our baronial charter.”
Giles picked up the twisted lead hoop and tossed it into Sir Gareth’s wheelbarrow.
“The bypass road is open to all commerce free of charge,” Giles said. “Wagon drivers will no longer use your mud track. They will use our concrete bridge, our macadam paving, and our town weigh-station. If you try to erect a barrier on the southern crown easement, Captain Drake will dismantle it and impound your timber as contraband.”
Giles turned toward his desk. “You’re trespassing in an active construction zone, Baron Cedric. You have two minutes to clear the Cardo Maximus before I assess a town blocked path fee.”
Cedric sat frozen, staring at the numbers written in Giles’s ledger. He had expected an isolated penal camp of ragged exiles shivering in sod huts, easy meat for a feudal shakedown. Instead, he found an entrenched Roman municipality with double-entry bookkeeping, standardized weights, and heavy bronze artillery sighted on his breastplate.
“You have no right to open a free road,” Cedric wheezed, his voice losing its bombast. “The trade of the defile belongs to Crag-Foot.”
“Trade belongs to whichever hall minimizes ton-mile transport costs,” Giles replied. “Your mud track needs six oxen to haul two tons at one mile per hour. Our macadamized bypass allows two oxen to haul four tons at three miles per hour. That represents an eight-fold improvement in freight smooth speed. No rational merchant will ever pay you another copper.”
Cedric stared at the calm engineer, then at Millicent’s open ledger, and finally at the flared bronze mouth on the gate stronghold.
His purple face drained of color until it looked like a curd of sheep’s cheese.
With a strangled squeak of pure feudal outrage, Cedric hauled on his reins. His palfrey spun in the mud, nearly throwing the fat lord into the ditch.
“You think you’re safe behind your little mud-arches, Croft?” Cedric yelled, his voice cracking into a shrill shriek. “You think you can steal my road and mock my bloodline?”
He jabbed a quivering, velvet-sleeved arm toward the dark pine forest to the south.
“Warlord Bronn is coming,” Cedric shouted. “The Broken Horn has gathered five hundred axes. They’re burning every settlement from Oakhaven to the river. I gave them the map of your ditch. When Bronn breaches your little wall, he will feed your bones to the crows and boil you in your own bathhouse.”
Cedric spurred his palfrey, galloping across the concrete bridge, his twelve retainers clattering behind him in disorganized panic.
The settlers watching from the insulae laughed. Young boys threw clods of turf after the fleeing horsemen. Duncan Stone-Splitter leaned against his hammer, grinning widely.
Giles didn’t cheer.
He walked to the edge of the terrace and watched the cloud of dust receding down the southern road.
“He gave them a map,” Kenneth said, standing at Giles’s elbow. His voice was grim. “Cedric knows every ford and deer trail in the lower valley. Bronn won’t blunder into the south ditch like Gareth did. He will come with purpose.”
“A map is only as good as the underlying terrain data,” Giles said in his flat voice. “And Cedric’s survey methodology is fully obsolete.”
He pulled his brass slide rule from his vest pocket.
“Five hundred infantry,” Giles muttered, calculating the supply settings. “If they march through the lower defile, their frontage is constrained to thirty feet. If they try to encircle us, they must cross the river gorge.”
He turned back toward the settlement. There, Toby was waiting with the twenty-foot chorobates level on a handcart.
“The bathhouse and mill are secure,” Giles said. “Now we secure the outer edge. We need water from the mountain, and we need artillery on the castle walls.”
He looked up at the granite crags towering against the sky.
“Toby, call Master Duncan and Caleb. We’re going to build an aqueduct that doubles as a raised stronghold.”