The white cloth was an ordinary kitchen drying towel, fringed at the borders with blue thread and marked in the corner with a laundry stamp from a mill town sixty leagues to the west. It hung limp in the dead air, dampened by the sleet that had begun to drift across the quarry rim once more, sticking to the rough ash pole with small, icy pats.
The boy who held it did not drop his arms. He stood planted in the slush of the approach road, twelve paces from the stone threshold of the False Gate, his wooden shoes sinking into the churned mud.
“Stay where you are, Hale!” Iven’s voice tore down from the upper terrace, sharp as a drawn saber, followed by the rapid clatter of her hobnailed boots descending the timber ladder.
Jon halted. His boots were four paces out from the scaffolding, his right hand still extended toward the folded dispatch in the boy’s fingers. The morning wind carried the cold, sharp scent of mountain snow, but beneath the frost lay another odor—faint, oily, and distinctly chemical. It was the acrid, metallic tang of boiled sulfur and vitriol, the smell that clung to the stonemasons’ clothes whenever they used chemical charges to crack stubborn shale.
