At midday on the thirteenth of the charter month, the caravan rolled through the South Barge Gate of Oran. Just then, the heavy cedar rafts from the upper river swung in against the timber fenders. Eight days on the drowned reed roads and the muddy post-track. Then, the city rose around them in a clamor of iron crane-chains, coopers’ mallets, and coal smoke drifting from the dye-vats along the canal. At the gatehouse arch, two junior clerks wearing the grey-and-copper badges of the Aperture Court stepped out from the toll booth with a clipboard of road manifests, their eyes fixed right away on the lead-lined central wagon.
They never reached the bridle of the lead mule. Ilyra rode three paces ahead of the shaft-team with her white Heron surcoat brushed clean of road mud and the bronze heron token held upright in her gauntleted left hand, while behind her marched four coopers’ guild wharf-wardens whom Mother Renn’s runner had fetched from the river landing an hour before. Before the Court clerks could demand a transfer to the North Ward storehouse, the senior wharf-warden stepped between their clipboard and the mules, reading aloud a town impoundment writ signed by two river aldermen to secure evidence in the highway murder of wagon driver Pel of South Wharf.
