The thunder came before the light.
It began as a low, subterranean tremor in the granite coping of the north gatehouse, a rhythm so deep and slow that Jon Hale felt it in the iron nails of his boot heels before his ears could separate the sound from the rush of the river below.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
It was not the rolling roar of a summer storm breaking over the bluffs, nor the crash of a quarry fall in the limestone pits. It was the synchronized beat of four great war drums, their drumheads made of cured bull-hide stretched over hollowed cedar logs, mounted on two-wheeled carts behind the ridge crest. Each stroke fell at intervals of three heartbeats, driving a heavy, unhurried pulse through the freezing morning mist.
Jon stood in the second embrasure of the north curtain wall, his calloused hands resting on the rough limestone sill. To his left, Captain Dain paced the wooden duckboards of the wall-walk, his steel-shod boots clattering over the planks as he checked the disposition of his thirty municipal archers.
The men from the town guild-halls were pale, their woolen coats buttoned high against the damp wind that whistled through the crenels. Joran Finch, the master of weavers, stood three merlons down, clutching a five-foot hunting bow of yew with knuckles that were bloodless and white. Beside him, young Tallis Vane, the tanner’s apprentice, was trying to wipe rain from his hemp bowstring with the greasy hem of his leather smock.
