The ash cane was four feet long, shaved flat on two sides, and notched with deep square cuts at every inch along its lower half. It was an old tool, greyed from three decades of lime mortar and river silt, its brass ferrule worn thin by thousands of impacts against bedrock, cobblestone, and foundation flags. Alden Bram never referred to it as a cane when he walked the streets of Harth; he called it his gauge, though on nights when the damp got into his shattered hip, he leaned upon it with all the quiet stubbornness of an oak tree rooted in shale.
Here in the cold wash of Low Sike, twenty yards from the north bank of the Low Sike run, Bram used the rod neither for walking nor for commanding. He used it to read what lay beneath the dark water.
“Gravel gives a false face,” Bram murmured, his boots planted firm against the downstream eddy. The water swirled against his thighs, foaming grey-white where his wool breeches broke the current. “A man steps into four inches of wash, feels round stones under his heel, and thinks he stands on a road. Two steps more, the current sweeps the pea gravel off the ledge, and his wagon drops into three feet of silt soup. A horse breaks a hock, a cart snaps an axle, and thirty people drown before they can unhitch the traces.”
