The red-coated column came up the hill road with the rhythmic, crunching tread of seasoned border infantry.
From the gate arch, Noll Vey tracked their approach through the stone sensors embedded in the lower boundary markers. Thirty soldiers marched two abreast, their round iron-rimmed ash shields slung over their left shoulders and their six-foot boar spears held at a rigid, forty-five-degree carry. They wore heavy grey wool tunics under boiled-leather hauberks stamped with the Crown’s triple-wheat sheaf, and their boots were thick, grease-blackened cowhide studded with iron hobnails that bit deep into the hillside shale.
The sound of thirty pairs of hobnailed boots striking stone together was a dry, relentless grinding—the sound of the kingdom’s ledger made flesh, walking up the slope to collect a debt.
At the head of the company rode Lord Auditor Orin Vane.
The master of the March Ledger sat upon a sleek, sure-footed black cob with braided mane and brass-mounted stirrup leathers. Vane wore his dark velvet traveling cloak lined with silver-fox fur, unfastened at the neck despite the biting autumn wind. His pale, narrow face was entirely calm, his thin lips set in the polite, bloodless crease of a high magistrate who had never in his life found it necessary to raise his voice to be obeyed.
