The four horsemen rode into the camp with the practiced, arrogant swagger of private cavalry running in unpoliced territory.
Their mounts were fine, big-boned bays with sleek coats and braided manes, their iron shoes clattering loudly over the dry limestone cobbles of the outer edge track. Each rider wore a buff-leather jerkin over a shirt of fine ring-mail, high calfskin boots. An iron skull-cap laced with black silk cords. Heavy cavalry broadswords hung at their saddle-bows, and short composite horse-bows were cased in varnished leather holsters beside their stirrups.
In the center of the troop rode Factor Vance Corley.
Corley was a man of thirty-five, slender and spotless, with sharp, fox-like features, cold amber eyes, and hair cut short in the fashionable style of the capital guilds. He wore a traveling coat of fine broadcloth dyed deep indigo, trimmed with beaver fur at the collar despite the desert heat, and gloves of supple doeskin that showed not a speck of bitter salt dust. Resting across his knees was a brass-bound dark wood dispatch case, inlaid with the crossed-sheaf crest of the Grand Merchant Consortium Land Trust.
He reined in his horse outside Kaelen Brant’s marquee, his beast’s iron shoes kicking up a cloud of white dust that drifted across the drying slates of the distillation still.
