Tessa Dene wedged the point of her salvage bread knife into the lower pivot socket of the west sally port and pried out a crust of hardened blue-tinted lime as thick as her thumb.
The mortar came away with a dry, gritty snap, falling onto the snowy threshold flags between her split leather boots. Right away, the stone jamb gave a faint, hollow sigh, like a tooth finally freed of a splinter. Up in the shadow of the gatehouse vault, Noll Vey’s carved basalt body stood with both arms folded across his grey chest, watching her work without lifting a finger to shift the stone himself.
“You missed a bit under the iron collar,” Noll remarked from the archway. “Half an inch behind the pawl bracket. If you leave old core-lime in the race, the grease will gum when the frost hits tonight.”
“I can see where the lime is, landlord,” Tessa said, blowing a curl of brown hair out of her eyes and scraping the back of the iron collar clean with the flat of her blade. Because the blade had been forged from scrap wagon-tire at less than nine inches and ground with a rounded butter-point to dodge the Crown’s arms tax, it made a surprisingly good mason’s spud. “And if you don’t stop breathing down my neck—or whatever it is you’re doing without lungs—I’m going to grease the ratchet with Hobb’s rancid mutton drip so it squeals every time someone goes out to empty a chamber pot.”
