The heavy iron-banded doors of Harth’s ancient guild-hall groaned on their grease-caked pintles as sixty men and women pushed through the low granite archway. It was a cavernous, low-ceilinged room that smelled of old wood smoke, wet sheep’s tallow, and the river silt that washed through the floor drains whenever the autumn spate rose above the quayside. High above the timber crossbeams, dusty guild banners hung limp in the draft: the crossed adzes of the masons, the shuttle of the weavers, the salting mallet of the fishmongers, and the split anvil of the smiths.
Apprentices dragged four heavy, rough-sawn ash trestle tables from the wall, slamming them together into a hollow square around the central iron brazier. In the open pit, peat sods and dry birch chunks crackled, spitting red sparks against the damp chimney hood.
Marris Gault took her place at the head of the north table. She did not sit; she slammed her five-pound stone-mason’s hammer onto the oak board with a concussive crack that silenced the scrape of benches across the room.
“Shut the outer wicket!” Marris roared toward the archway. “Let the shareholders and guild masters take the benches. The rest of the town stays in the square under Captain Dain’s watch. We have forty-eight hours before Marshal Ors’s scouts reach the river bend, and I will not waste an hour of it listening to eighty men shout about their chickens.”
