At the two-inch lift of Warden Brecht’s gloved hand, the six riders behind the black carriage swung their right legs over their high cantles and dismounted onto the market cobbles in a single, simultaneous crash of blued steel.
Jon Hale stood on the bottom step of the River Lantern porch and watched them with the careful, practical eye of a man who had spent twelve lifetimes learning the difference between soldiers who came to hold a wall and soldiers who came to break a house. Alongside him at the corner of the porch steps stood master mason Alden Bram, his massive chest wrapped in his leather mason’s apron, his brass compasses tucked into his belt, and his heavy iron-shod ash measuring rod planted upright against his boot.
The six troopers did not move like frontier garrison spearmen or even like Sir Cael Ardent’s old household lancers. Each man wore half-plate of oil-quenched blued steel stamped over the breastbone with the blindfolded scale of the Chancellery Oath Guard, their joints muffled with oiled leather washers so neither greave nor tasset clinked when they stepped. Across their shoulders hung a faint, uniform shimmer of pale gold heat—the active systemic aura of Sworn Duty, an imperial martial covenant that locked a trooper’s muscles against fatigue, pain, and hesitation for as long as he believed he was executing a lawful sovereign warrant.
