Master Mason Alden Bram did not hesitate when Sir Cael Ardent asked where thirty quarter-casks of royal siege powder could be placed before midnight without dropping a roof on a single townsman.
Stepping forward to the edge of the oak trestle-table, the sixty-three-year-old mason laid his heavy iron pinch-bar down along the northern margin of the vellum survey and drew a blunt, mortar-scarred forefinger down the western road outside the West Quay curtain wall.
“You put those thirty casks under the West Quay granary because you were looking at the street inside the wall after the gate broke, Sir Cael,” Bram said gruffly, tapping the inked bend of the outer river road two hundred yards beyond the western gatehouse. “Look outside the gate instead, where the road comes down off the limestone bluff through the old coaching cut.”
Cael leaned over the vellum map, his grey eyes narrowing as his Returner memory pulled up the exact topography of the outer western road.
“The coaching cut below the bluff is sixty feet wide between the river bank and the cliff face,” Cael said, measuring the scale with two gauntleted fingers. “A subterranean mine laid under open road-gravel will merely blow a crater in the mud; Marshal Ors’s pioneers will fill it with fascine bundles in twenty minutes and roll their iron battering frames straight over the lip.”
