Dusk brought a wet, driving sleet off the northern peaks, and with the sleet came Cale, crawling up on his elbows and knees through the old sheep-pen drainage culvert with an oilcloth bundle clutched under his soaked clerk’s coat.
Noll Vey felt the young man’s boot-toes scrape against the iron grate at the lower end of the stone drain ten minutes before the second full twenty-four-hour span of the siege ran out. All afternoon Noll had kept a sliver of his Bastion awareness fixed on that culvert—the same narrow masonry channel through which the scarf girl Maren had escaped the burning fort thirty years ago during the Hill War, and through which Tessa’s bread-knot signals ran down to the valley.
When Cale had slipped out through the ditch before noon, wearing an old teamster’s oilskin cape over his wool waistcoat and carrying nothing but a brass latch-pick and a sack of turnip tops for cover, Noll had offered to throw a small shadow-blur across the culvert mouth to hide him from Vane’s picket sentries. Cale had refused on the spot.
“If you spend core force hiding me,” the clerk had said, adjusting his horn-rimmed spectacles on his nose, “the clock drops, and Vane’s register compasses will catch the flare. Besides, nobody in the March Ledger looks twice at a junior clerk carrying wet paper in the rain.”
