At ten minutes past the tenth bell, the street shutters of the River Lantern Inn were barred with heavy oak cross-beams, the five off-duty Oath Guards were asleep in the stable-yard garret above the hay-bays, and Warden Brecht had gone up to the North Bridge gatehouse to check the midnight picket line after Courier Tobin’s warning.
In the center of the deserted taproom, under the yellow pool of light cast by the iron chandelier ring, Sir Cael Ardent stood alone over the wide oak trestle-table that served as his field command board.
He was still dressed in his blued steel breastplate and high gold gorget, his white rose surcoat hanging behind his knees. Weighted down at the four corners of the oak board by lead plumb-weights lay a large vellum military survey of Harth and its river approaches, marked with red and black wax tallies representing Marshal Ors’s six thousand northern veterans and the town’s scant four hundred defenders.
Because Courier Tobin had delivered the Oak Ford relay packet at seven o’clock, Cael had already moved twelve black wax blocks away from the southern Low Sike marsh and stacked them in a dense, threatening wedge along the limestone bluff directly above the West Quay waterfront.
