Six pairs of iron grappling hooks bit into the wet limestone coping of the low river wall twenty paces below St. Jude’s porch. Up out of the freezing river mist rose the rusted iron helmets of Marshal Ors’s assault pioneers, their shields slung across their backs as they swarmed up the thirty-foot ash rungs to take the bridge gatehouse in the flank while the chapel burned.
Sir Cael Ardent looked toward his ancestral greatsword lying across Jon Hale’s forearm. The knight’s right hand was bound in Elin’s oil-soaked linen around the ash shingle splint, the two outer fingers curled and dead from the white-hot iron tie-strap that had branded through the palmar nerve sheath. If he tried to draw the five-foot blade left-handed without a counterweight strap, the first heavy parry against a halberd shaft would wrench his wrist out of its socket.
Before Cael could reach for the hilt with his left hand, Master Smith Garrick Holt and twelve smithy and cooperage apprentices charged down the cobbled lane from Bay Two of the west hoarding, carrying eight-foot iron-shod ash scaling-forks and two glowing braziers of slaked lime and boiling tallow-water on oak carrying-poles.
“Stay by the priestess, Sir Knight—the guilds have the river coping!” Garrick Holt bellowed, planting his heavy forge boots against the inner masonry base of the low parapet alongside Captain Dain’s second-rank pikemen. “Apprentices, set your fork-tines under the top iron hooks! On my count—lift and twist!”
