The silence that swallowed the market square of Harth was colder than the river fog.
Marshal Ors stepped through the shattered oak arch of the north water-gate, his boots crunching on broken roofing slate and wet glass. He was fifty-eight winters old, a veteran of twenty border campaigns, with a scarred, hawkish face framed by an iron sallet blackened with forge soot. Over his heavy plate armor he wore a wolf-skin mantle clasped with a bronze torc. In his right gauntlet he carried a five-foot broadsword with an unpolished blued edge, notched from breaking the timber barricades along the wharves.
Behind him marched sixty veteran dismounted cuirassiers of the Third Border Battalion, their blackened iron shields locked edge to edge, their eyes darting between the second-story shutters of the weavers’ hall and the dark alleys of Fish Street.
Ors had breached eleven river towns in his military life. He knew the choreography of a captured ward by heart.
There should have been crowds of screaming women and children jammed against the churchyard railings. There should have been carts overturned in the gutters, abandoned bundles of bedding, terrified apprentices hiding behind beer barrels, and grain merchants weeping over broken padlocks. In past campaigns, an imperial commander seized those civilians immediately, herding three hundred non-combatants into the cellar flues to serve as thermal ballast while his sappers ignited the resonance engines.
