The morning sun over the Mere valley was a flat, watery disc of pale brass that did nothing to warm the mud along the ditch road.
Down at the main archway of the ruined hill fort, Cale stood upon the granite mounting block with his spectacles pushed firmly up the bridge of his nose, holding a four-foot scroll of stiff legal vellum unrolled across his chest like an ecclesiastical banner. Beside him on the stone post sat Prit, his bony ankles swinging over the drop, his grey slate tucked under his elbow and a fresh piece of white chalk gripped between his skeletal fingers.
Across the ditch, four Crown road guards in green woolen surcoats and iron pot-helmets stood leaning on their heavy ash spears, their expressions shifting by agonizing degrees from suspicious hostility to profound, soul-crushing despair.
“We turn now,” Noll Vey’s Threshold voice boomed from the stones of the gatehouse, rich with the sonorous, unhurried dignity of a cathedral proctor reading a ninety-year lease, “to Subsection Four of the Western Culvert Easement Ordinance of the Year of the Seven Frosts. Master Cale, if you would be so good as to recite the specific schedule of allowable silt accumulations within the gravel aprons?”
