An engineer did not need to see the missile to know its mass.
Alden Bram had spent forty-two years listening to materials fail. He knew the dry snap of green timber before it fractured, the dry grumble of lime mortar turning to dust beneath an overloading arch, and the high-pitched whistle of cold steel cutting through damp river air. That whistle was not a common hunting arrow. It was a three-inch square-headed steel quarrel driven by an iron cranequin winch, packing enough kinetic force to split a two-inch oak plank from fifty yards.
Bram did not shout. Shouting was for militia captains who had time to waste on breath.
Instead, the old mason dropped his adze and threw his left arm outward, his heavy oak-and-iron pavise swinging off his shoulder with a violent clatter of harness leather. The shield was an engineer’s tool as much as an arm—three layers of seasoned ash bound with hoop-iron and faced with beaten sheet steel, scarred by twenty years of falling stone chips and quarry blasts.
He drove his shoulder into Jon Hale’s chest, shoving the innkeeper back against the heavy granite casing of the sluice winch, and swept the curved iron lip of the pavise across Tobin’s midsection just as the volley struck.
