From his vantage on the upper bastion wall, Noll Vey looked down through the driving grey drizzle at the slate roofs of Mere.
His basalt hands rested on the parapet coping. Beneath his palms, the deep foundation channels thrummed with the frantic clatter of boots echoing up from the town alleyways.
Through the fifth brass boundary token in Reeve Holt’s collar and the fourth in Cale’s wool coat, Noll felt the sudden, violent rupture of pursuit. Down at the Survey House, three armed bailiffs had burst into the lower archive, found Lady Serit’s chair severed and empty, and come roaring back up the stairs. An iron-tongued alarm horn was already sounding from the Crown custom-house dock, its flat, brassy bray rolling across the river pasture.
“They’re in the alley behind the grain loft,” Sella Rusk said. She stood beside Noll on the rampart, her oilskin cloak streaming with rain, her grey eyes narrowed as she watched the lower lane through her field glass. “Sixteen heavy infantry from the camp picket have swung across the lower bridge to cut off the culvert mouth. If Tessa and Cale try to cross the open timber yard with the envoy on their shoulders, those crossbows will pin them against the log booms before they make twenty yards.”
