The bell came down from the cliff at the top of every hour, and Brannoc felt each ring go lower than the one before.
He lay in the gate-seat with his back against the oak and his hands flat on the windlass-housing, where the river gate’s great leaf turned on its pins, and he listened. The seat was a stone room no wider than a cart, cut into the masonry behind the gate’s inner face, with a single lamp on a hook and a drain in the floor that carried the river’s seep out under the wall. Water ran in that drain without stopping. Brannoc had come to know its sound as a man comes to know his own breathing, and when it changed he knew something outside had changed too.
The bell rang from the camp under the cliff. It was a small silver note, very clean, rung in the Order’s pattern: one stroke, and then a pause, and then a second stroke that did not finish. He heard it through the oak and through the stone, and then he heard it again, an hour later, and the second stroke came up out of the water a little lower than it had been before.
