The iron spy-slit in the sluice gate was four inches wide and framed in river rust. Through the vertical bar, the world beyond Harth had narrowed to a strip of gray water, wet willow branches, and slaughter.
Jon Hale kept his left palm pressed flat against the rough-sawn oak. The spray from the trapped pool behind the gate soaked his wool tunic, but his boots remained planted on the slimy granite apron. Beside him, Alden Bram stood with his head down, his thick hands still clamped on the secondary locking lever.
“Don’t look through the slit, Jon,” Bram said, his voice thick with gravel. “You can’t mend what fell on the far side of the oak.”
“I have the Witness Vow, Alden,” Jon replied. “If I turn my back on the gravel, the vow on my wrist cuts to the bone. Sister Oda warned me of that much in the cellar: a Keeper who looks away from his dead has already broken his book.”
Through the slit, forty paces out in the brown foam of the shallows, the imperial cavalry vanguard did its work with cold efficiency.
Marshal Ors’s lancers did not charge in a wild wedge. They advanced in pairs on heavy bay geldings, their iron-shod ash lances rising and falling with rhythmic force.
