The morning light revealed the true majesty of town public works. Along twenty miles of frontier castle walls, the shaggy mountain pine work poles stood tall, straight, and plumb. Their baked-clay spool insulators shone like polished ivory. Below them, the soldiers of Iron Bastion were singing marching songs as they ate hot porridge, fully refreshed after the first quiet, beast-free night in three decades.
Yet high council, like mold in a stuffy crawlspace, never sleeps. Just as Frank was finishing a plate of fried dough sticks at the tailgate of his wagon, the sound of fluttering silk and chiming bells drifted from the southern sky.
Floating down toward the muster grounds was a convoy of three lavish airborne palanquins carved from scented agarwood, draped in cloth-of-gold curtains and borne aloft by four-winged sky cranes. Stepping out from the lead palanquin was a plump, smooth-faced bureaucrat wearing the midnight-purple robes of a Senior Checker from the Hegemonic Regional Pavilion’s Department of Celestial Aesthetics. Behind him trotted four clerks carrying heavy brass-bound ledgers, their noses tilted so high into the mountain air that they appeared to be navigating by the clouds.
“Disgraceful!” Inspector Sun announced, his shrill voice echoing across the courtyard as he pointed a manicured finger at Utility Pole #1. “Abominable! Vulgar! Who authorized the erection of these hideous wooden sticks along the royal frontier?!”
