On the twelfth stroke of the Mere market bell, the wind on the northern ridge smelled of wet coal and vinegar.
Through the valley-wide reach of his Dominion ring—stretched taut from the subterranean witness floor up through the limestone seams of the mountain pass—Noll Vey felt the outer edge of his awareness brush the three crescent-shaped earthworks dug into the shale above the old silver mine.
He could not see the gun pits with clear mortar-sight, because no dungeon wall of his stood on that ridge; yet at Rank Five, iron in the quantities Battery-Chief Gant commanded pressed into the earth like three heavy thumbprints on a drumhead. Twelve siege mortars of cast royal bronze sat bolted to oak beds behind gabions of woven willow and river clay. And forty paces below the first parapet, breath steaming in the freezing mist, Hobb scrambled up onto the mossy watch-stump beside the fort’s outer speaking-horn funnel.
Up in the first artillery pit, Battery-Chief Gant stood with a brass pocket-glass in one gloved hand and a turnip watch in the other.
Gant was a stocky, square-shouldered artilleryman with thirty winters of powder-burn stippled across his cheeks and a voice eroded by cannon smoke into a permanent gravel rasp. Since six o’clock that morning, a sealed yellow dispatch signed by Lord Auditor Orin Vane had been pinned to the ammunition chest beside his knee:
