The western undercroft of Fort Karst smelled of freezing lime, dry straw. The sweet, dusty scent of forty tons of milled wheat flour.
It was three hours before dawn. The blizzard had blown itself out into a clear, frozen twilight. That left the castle wrapped in a brittle crust of blue-grey ice. Down in the cellars, oil lamps hung from wrought-iron wall sconces. Their flames flickered in the steady, freezing draft that seeped through the air-flow grates.
Vane Vale walked down the narrow central aisle between the ten-foot stacks of grain sacks. His ivory-headed cane was tucked beneath his arm. He wore an apron of coarse, raw, unwhitened linen tied over his velvet coat to keep the flour dust off his dark blue broadcloth. But his thumb moved across his gold-trimmed pocket counting frame with the restless, rhythmic speed of a hunting hound sniffing a cold trail.
Click. Snap.
The merchant stopped before Stack Seven.
He frowned, leaning forward until his manicured goatee was three inches from the coarse burlap sacks. His sharp, calculating grey eyes narrowed.
“Sloppy,” Vane muttered to himself. “Appallingly, catastrophically sloppy.”
He reached out with two gloved fingers, prodding the twisted hemp cord that sealed the neck of the topmost sack.
