South Lane sloped downward from the market cross between the high, windowless limestone walls of the salt-curing sheds and the rear buttresses of the bakehouse, funneling the river rain and the escaping bathhouse vapor into a white, ankle-deep trough of fog.
Jon Hale moved down the left-hand wall at a fast, silent trot, his heavy iron-shod boots placing their heels carefully on the broad gutter-stones to avoid the loose cobbles in the crown of the street. In his right hand he carried his seasoned ash tap-mallet—four pounds of lignum-weighted oak bound with two iron hoops, balanced for driving bungs into eighty-gallon ale tuns—and in his left he held the dead border soldier’s knife (#5), its pale honed ring cool against his right pinky finger because he was carrying the blade strictly within its entrusted purpose: defending those under his care from an unseen attacker.
Behind him walked Sister Oda with her horn lantern shuttered down to a paper-thin slit of amber light, flanked by two veteran river-gate halberdiers whose steel polearms were wrapped in wet wool rags to dull any glint of torchlight.
Thirty yards ahead, where the lane dead-ended against the massive battered masonry of Harth’s south curtain wall, the squat red-brick domes of the municipal bathhouse loomed out of the mist like three half-buried kilns.
