The north livery stable smelled of ammonia, wet hay, and the sharp, mineral tang of cold iron.
Lady Signe Lorr stood in the dim corridor between the box stalls, her boots planted firmly in the straw-littered dirt. She wore her dark wool travelling mantle, but the hem was pinned back to give her limbs free movement, and beneath the coarse cloth she wore a light, flexible brigandine of overlapping steel scales. In her gloved right hand, she carried no weapon; she held a rolled cylinder of heavy imperial parchment sealed with yellow beeswax and stamped with the eagle-and-compass of the Imperial Assize.
Behind her, pressed flat against the rough pine stall partitions, Captain Dain and six seasoned watchmen waited in complete silence. They carried no torches. The only illumination came from the dusty grey daylight filtering down through the hayloft loading doors thirty feet above. The watchmen held their seven-foot billhooks horizontal, the curved iron blades muffled with strips of oiled rag to prevent any betraying metallic clink against the woodwork.
In the reinforced box stall at the end of the stable corridor, Sixth Oath Guard Morvath was held under armed watch.
At dawn, twenty minutes after the sixth bell, Captain Dain and Signe had intercepted Morvath as the assassin emerged from the sewage conduit beneath the river wall, disarming him of his serrated trench-blade and serving the formal Assize detention warrant under Article Nine before he could reach the bathhouse flues. Yet the imperial operative had refused to yield…
