At dawn on the fourth day before the feast—with ninety-five hours remaining on the Last Guest’s clock—Lord Auditor Orin Vane took the water out of Mere.
Noll Vey felt it happen before the first bucket hit dry stone in the town square.
He was standing in his basalt host body near the fort’s lower cistern arch while Prit checked the brass stop-cocks Hobb had fitted the afternoon prior. Through the deep north foundation channel that Dominion rank had opened beneath the hill, Noll’s awareness rested lightly on the masonry shaft of Mere’s iron market well half a mile down the slope. All night the groundwater there had stood twenty-two feet deep in the limestone sump, fed by the upper mill-stream aquifer that crossed the eastern pasture.
Then, just as grey light touched the snow on the ridge, Noll felt twelve heavy iron-shod timber gates drop into the upper mill sluice at the edge of Vane’s siege lines.
At the same time, two teams of army sappers manning double-action leather force-pumps at the lower drainage ditch began heaving on their pump brakes. With rhythmic, mechanical strokes, they sucked the standing water out of the town’s fractured gravel bed and dumped it straight into the outer siege moat below the road barricade.
