The Watch vessel stood on the third plinth, shoulder-high and rounded at the belly, and Brannoc knew its shape before he touched it. He knew it the way a hand knows a latch in the dark. His gate-hand had been shaped to it every day since the gate was rebuilt, every time he had lifted the bar and set his palm to the windlass and felt the iron answer. He had never thought of the shape as having a source. He had thought of it as the shape of the gate, and the gate as the shape of the Hold, and the Hold as the thing that had always been there, at the top of the Lessary road, waiting for someone to come and count it.
He walked down the third row with his white hand held a little out from his side, as if he were feeling for a rail. The tiles were cool under his boots. The lamp was behind him, in Ysra’s hands, and its light fell past his shoulder and onto the rim of the vessel, so that the band of cut letters caught the blue and held it. He stopped. He looked down.
WATCH.
It was cut in the same square capitals as the lintel, a finger’s width deep and very sharp at the edges, and someone had gone over each stroke with a fine tool to make sure it would last. The letters had been filled with dust, and Brannoc did not rub them…
