The young lookout who came tumbling down the southern watch path was named Toby. A lean, quick-footed carter’s apprentice from the third wagon who usually spent his evenings mending harness straps or teasing the camp mules with dried apple rinds. He carried no spear, no lantern, and had lost his felt cap somewhere in the dark scree of the upper gully. His woolen shirt was torn at the collar, and when he reached the cleared limestone curb of the counterpart bench, his breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps that sprayed white salt-dust across his boots.
“Master Thane,” Toby choked out. He gripped Joric’s heavy leather forearm with both hands to keep from collapsing onto the freshly swept stone. “Up on the dark rock crest. The southern notch. There’s lights.”
Joric caught the lad by his shoulder, steadying him with an iron grip that had hauled runaway wagons back from ravine lips. “Speak like a wagon driver, Toby. How many lights? Lanterns or torches? And whose ground are they sitting on?”
“Lamps,” Toby gasped, his chest heaving as he pointed back toward the high, jagged rim that bounded the southern horizon of the Saltglass basin. “Four of them. Yellow oil lamps, bright as harvest stars. Three sitting dead level in a row near the notch crest, and another one walking below them, waving slow like an outrider guiding teams through a gully. Corry and the smith’s boys saw them first from the watch ledge. They’re saying it’s the southern relief train…
