Ulvan Dret stood on the three-foot limestone stone base at the corner of the upkeep lane, his weathered hands resting flat on the iron-studded lapels of his land-mapper’s coat. The wind off the high Spine whipped through his thinning grey hair, tugging at the frayed cuffs of the sleeves that had carried Krail’s military insignia for nine years.
Every soldier in the forty-man crowd surging up the ramp knew him. For three seasons, Master Surveyor Dret had been the man who assigned their ditch-digging details, measured their fortification stone retaining walls. Then they signed the building vouchers that allowed them to draw extra rations from the citadel cellars. He wasn’t a distant general who spoke in grandiloquent promises of glory. He was the tired, cynical craftsman who had walked their trenches with a wooden rod and caught every crooked timber.
“Hold your lines, men of the Host!” Ulvan’s voice boomed across the roadway. It was a voice trained in crowded briefing tents and echoing quarry galleries. It was dry, carrying, and entirely devoid of panic. “Halt where you stand and listen to the arithmetic, before you turn an orderly discharge into a hanging offense!”
The advancing soldiers slowed their pace, their boots grinding to a halt on the gravel twenty paces below the ore cart. Several veteran pikemen lowered their weapons. They looked up at the grey-haired mapper with a mixture of suspicion and ingrained habit.
