The fortified mountain headworks of High-Arch loomed across the narrow neck of the gorge like a gray stone titan barring the throat of the world.
Built during the First Imperial Reconstruction eighty years before, the castle was a huge castle wall of dressed limestone blocks, built directly across the rocky deep gap where the underground snowmelt of the High Karst burst from the mountain drain tubes. Its central gatehouse rose forty feet into the freezing alpine mist. It was flanked by two eight-sided watchtowers pierced with narrow arrow-slits. Two heavy portcullises of case-hardened Swedish iron, their three-inch square bars armed with sharpened chisel points, blocked the central carriage arch.
Along the upper crenelations, forty private High court guards stood in tight formation. They wore oiled buff coats heavy with iron shoulder-plates, polished steel morions, and dark blue sashes. Ten heavy wall-heavy steel crossbows, mounted on swivel yokes and cocked with steel windlasses, pointed their four-inch square bolts directly down the paved roadway, while twenty guards held smoking match-cords poised over the touch-holes of heavy matchlock musketoons.
Tomas Reed halted the column of marchers two hundred paces from the outer ditch.
With practiced cart hauling discipline, the twelve hundred canton smallholders, mountain herders, and orchardists fanned out across the rocky terrace in four broad, orderly lines. Not a man moved past the painted red boundary stones. Not a single spade or staff was raised in anger. The silence that settled over the mountain pass was heavy, cold, and careful.
