The Gilt Lanterns came down off the ridge in the dark, forty of them, with lanterns hung on their helms and fire-pots slung from poles across their shoulders, and Gaunt heard them before he saw them, because they were singing.
It was a Corvanne marching song, a bawdy thing about a miller’s daughter and a well-bucket, and the men sang it in hard, flat voices that carried up the Caul’s shoulder and over the outer ward’s stones like hail on a tin roof. Gaunt had heard the song once before, in the market at Lowgate, sung by a drunk carter who had got the words wrong in every verse. These men had the words right. They sang them in step, and the step was steady, and that was what made the hair rise on the back of his neck. Drunks could not keep a step. These men could.
He was at the outer ward’s breach when they came over the rise, with a bar of hot iron in his hands and the Forge’s cart drawn up behind him, its brazier red and roaring. He had carried the bar up from the Forge himself, since no one else would carry it hot without spilling, and he had told the Watch’s lad who had tried to help him that he would carry the bar on his own two hands or not at all, and the lad had stepped aside with a look that said Gaunt would be dead by midnight if he…
