Idrin stood on the parapet above the cliff-road at dawn, with his hands on the cold stone and the wind coming up off the valley in long soft shoves, and looked down at what the Corvanne company had built in the night.
It was a frame. That was the first thing he saw, and the thing he had been dreading since the Watch had reported the sound of hammers at midnight. It was a great square frame of timber, laid out on the flat ground below the cliff where the road turned away from the Hold toward the Caul. Its uprights were thick as a man’s waist and its crossbeams were longer than the Watch-tower’s stair was high. At one end a great arm had been set on a pivot of iron, with a counterweight of stacked stone hung from its far end in a net. The arm was not yet raised. It lay across the frame like the bar of a gate that had not been dropped.
The Hollowed were walking the frame’s timbers. They walked up one beam and down another, in a slow, measuring rhythm, stopping at each joint to lay a hand flat on the wood and then moving on. Idrin counted the figures. There were eleven. Their hands, at this distance, were grey smudges, but he could see how they moved, the long fingers spread, the palms flat, as though they were feeling the grain for a crack. He had seen the sappers’ hands on…
