Ten paces down the dark brick channel, crouched in the shadow where the clean-out tunnel met the main northern drainage under-road drain, Yseld Arken received the signal.
She felt the two faint shakes travel through the glass-fused brickwork—the double-tap of Kezra’s ash rod against the mortar seam.
The former Cairn Host route guide didn’t hesitate. Reaching into the dark recess above her shoulder, her fingers closed around the cold, rusted iron pipe rim of the cast-iron salt water intake pipe. The twenty-four-inch channel that ran straight through the pump house wall and projected into the sunlit tiered arena outside.
She lifted the iron-shod metal ring of her hooked climbing staff.
She didn’t strike the pipe with a heavy, ringing blow that would sound like an alarm. A loud clang would bring both the corporal and Dalen running with weapons drawn, their senses alerted to an attack. Instead, Yseld tapped the hollow iron casting with two sharp, sliding strokes: clink-scrape, clink-scrape.
It was an exact, flawless sound imitation of a loosened mule shoe striking loose pale limestone gravel. The dry, stumbling clatter an unhitched pack animal makes when it steps off a hard track onto the shale apron of a ditch.
