The carbon leaf inside Cale’s lining smelled of lamp-soot and stolen tallow, and every step up the frozen cart track from Mere made it rustle against his ribs like dry leaves in a coffin.
He did not take the main road past the milestone where the two customs guards stood stamping their boots by a brazier. Even with his brass clerk’s badge pinned to his lapel, the air around the Survey House that morning had carried a tight, metallic hum that made the fillings in his back teeth ache. Instead, Cale ducked behind the weaver Mira’s dye-shed, scrambled up the shale bank where the winter runoff had gullied the brush, and slipped through the thorn-hedged outer ditch where Noll Vey’s gatehouse arch stood open to the grey morning.
Inside the courtyard, the blind rubble hound Bristle lifted its heavy slate head from its pen. The creature had no eyes to see Cale’s ink-stained cuffs, only nostrils formed from cracked mortar seams that flared twice as it took in the scent of Survey House blotting sand and cheap wool. Finding no fox fur on the clerk’s coat, the hound settled back down with a clatter of loose pebbles.
Cale hurried past the pen, his breath steaming in the cold air, and pushed through the heavy oak doors of the Grand Hall.
