The heavy oak door of the writing hall rattled under three distinct, measured knocks. Two quick raps, a pause, and a heavy downward thud of an iron-tipped survey rod.
Sile Rook didn’t lower his hooked pruning blade, but he stepped aside and lifted the cross-timber. The door swung inward with a dry creak, admitting a blast of freezing rain-mist and the smell of wet oilcloth, sodden wool, and brass polish. Nessa Vale slipped through the opening, her shoulders hunched against the cold and her oilskin haversack dripping a trail of dark river water onto the limestone flags.
She was thirty-one years old, wiry and compact, with her short brown hair plastered against her forehead by the storm. Around her neck hung her aimed sound tube. A foot-long metal tube of velvet-lined silver with a flared bell, fitted with a said clearlybrass ear-bracket that hooked over her left ear to compensate for the eighty percent hearing loss she had suffered in the West Bridge collapse twelve years ago.
“Lock the bar,” Nessa said crisply, unbuckling her wet gaiters without looking at them. Her voice was sharp, clipped, and pitched slightly high, the rhythm of someone who lived in a world where sound was an expensive luxury. “The Ducal cavalry has set up a checkpoint at the bridge of the Tanners. They’re searching vegetable carts for weapons and seizing every unbound folio of paper they can find.”
