The cold autumn rain had turned the alleys between South Lane and the river into ribbons of slick black mire. Jon Hale moved through the dark with the familiar, instinctive certainty of a man who had walked these streets under three dozen moons. He wore his heavy frieze work coat, its collar turned up against the drizzle, an unlit tin lantern tucked beneath his arm to shield the glass from flying gravel.
He did not take the river path directly. An hour after the sixth bell, Cael’s oath guards patrolled the stone quay with four-man squads, their iron lanterns casting swinging yellow circles across the swollen current. Jon slipped instead through the narrow passage behind the bakehouse, climbed the low dry-stone wall separating the tannery pits from the willow bottom, and dropped into the thick scrub of the riverbank.
Here, the water smelled different. Away from the woodsmoke and brewing vats of the town, the river carried the sharp, bitter stench of sodden peat, rotting sedge grass, and the sulfurous taint of the northern marsh where Marshal Ors had pitched his siege lines.
The Old Mill stood twenty paces upstream from the town wall, an ancient two-story timber structure perched on limestone pilings over the mill race. Its roof had sagged forty years ago, and the massive undershot wheel hung motionless in the black water, choked with drift logs and river weeds.
