Down inside the warm room, the miners’ bickering had settled into a steady, companionable murmur of grease, coal dust, and old timber shifts, but twenty paces up the corridor at the outer gatehouse arch, the valley’s air told a far darker story.
Noll Vey walked his limestone host body out into the freezing drizzle of the gate arch, his boots grinding on the gravel where the fort’s claimed threshold met the open Crown turnpike. Beside him walked Cale, clutching two parchment chits from Edren’s tin box, his wool scarf pulled tight to his ears against the north wind.
“Look at the sentry at the tollhouse ditch, Noll,” Cale whispered, nodding toward the lantern hanging from the Crown pole forty yards down the slope.
Through his stone perception and his Bastion bedrock sense, Noll listened to the two town watchmen huddled by the tollhouse brazier.
“Shame about old Edren,” the younger watchman was saying, turning a spit with a cold turnip on the embers. “My mother always thought he was an honest sort, but the bailiffs showed the magistrate’s roll at the tavern door an hour ago. Forged his timber slips for six years, they said. Never spent a single winter underground.”
