The north yard token was an old iron carriage axle wedged into a split granite boulder sixty feet below the Raven’s Notch.
Through the conductive chill of the iron, Noll Vey could hear every syllable carried on the north wind. The sleet was turning to hard, stinging pellets that clicked against the granite like spilled birdshot. Up on the crest, nine hundred heavy shield-bosses were locked together in a single unbroken wall of black iron, braced against the gale.
“Look at them down there!” Colonel Vask shouted. His voice was raw, stripped of theatrical resonance, the voice of a man who had shouted commands over frozen rivers and burning palisades for forty years. “Look at the ditch companies throwing their pikes into the mud! Look at the wagon train unhitching their mules because an old woman waved a wax seal from a carriage window!”
The nine hundred men of the First Veteran Foot did not cheer. They were not green recruits looking for an excuse to yell. They stood with their iron-shod boots planted wide in the frozen gravel, their sixteen-foot boar spears angled down the gully, their breaths rising in a steady, gray fog above their blackened helmets.
“I know what a pit-core does,” Vask said, pacing slowly before the shield wall with his iron command staff resting in the crook of his elbow. “Ten winters back, at the Red Marsh outpost, we thought we had a peaceful holding. We thought the core was just an old lime cistern…
