The sound that stopped the pursuit was not a war cry, but the sharp, sickening crack of dry bone snapping under a shearing load.
Down in the sunken service chute, Kezra Venn had barely guided the grey mule’s hindquarters around the first stone landing. Just then, the noise echoed through the limestone vaulting. It was a clear sound. The exact sound she had heard eighteen months ago on the high crags of the adventurer check. Just then, the tester Eddic had slipped on a rotten support post and struck his ankle against a granite ledge.
Thirty paces above them. There, the service chute emerged onto the cobbled apron of the toll booth courtyard, a young Cairn Host corporal lay sprawled across the stones.
He was barely twenty years old, wearing the slate-grey surcoat and blackened iron shin guards of Captain Vale’s calm distance. In his eagerness to capture the fleeing map maker and claim the bounty offered by Stonewake Citadel, he had vaulted the low courtyard low roof wall at a dead sprint, his broadsword drawn. His eyes were locked on the disappearing tail-rope of the pack mule.
He hadn’t seen the twenty-foot hemp drag-rope that trailed behind the wrecked toll cart.
