Harrow repaired the inside stake’s bar by moonlight, because the Watch could not be left without a bar on the causeway and the Crown could not be trusted to send a carpenter.
The bar had split down its length when the cart went over it. It was a heavy beam of Lowgate oak, bound at either end with iron, and the cart’s near wheel had come down across its middle with the full weight of the chest and the two wardens and the driver’s box, and the oak had cracked along the grain from the third stake-rung to the fourth. It would hold, Harrow thought, for a few more carts. It would not hold for a Watch that had been told to lift it and set it down a hundred times a day. Nor would it hold a password. A split bar was a bar that could be opened by anybody who knew which crack to lever, and the Watch had learned that lesson on the first night of the blockade, when a Lessaran crowbar had been found in the reeds with its end still wet.
So he took the old bar down.
He did it in the dark, with the Watch’s lantern on the stake’s upper rung and a boy from Lowgate holding it steady. He worked with his hands and the Mason’s chisel and his count-cord, which he had tied round his wrist for the purpose, and he counted every movement aloud, in the flat voice he kept…
