The six royal baggage wagons had not made it past the mountain toll-gate at West-Reach.
Hester Reed, with forty mounted commoner wagon drivers and armed quarry court guards, had closed the heavy iron drop-gate across the mountain gorge at midnight, cutting off the high road to the capital. The six four-horse wagons arrived in the sleet. Then, their drivers had found the road blocked by three felled hemlock logs and sixty men with notched crossbows and timber-axes.
Now, the six wagons sat in the gravel courtyard of the Diverter’s office pavilion. It was surrounded by two hundred grim-faced quarrymen and draymen.
Tomas stepped into the courtyard, with Renn Tal and Master Hal. Behind them walked Hester Reed. It carried her iron-bound appellate ledger under her arm and a bundle of sharpened goose quills in her belt.
Standing before the lead wagon were five men who looked as though they had stepped out of an oil painting in the high palaces of Crown-Reach. They wore long greatcoats of midnight-blue broadcloth lined with Siberian beaver fur, high boots of polished cordovan leather that had never touched gravel, and velvet caps adorned with the silver compass-rose of the Imperial Ministry of Works.
At their center stood Lord Commissioner Vane, chief royal engineer of the Continental Diverter. A man of fifty-five with pale, soft hands, a thin mustache trimmed to the width of a knife blade, and eyes that darted nervously across the sea of patched woolen coats surrounding him.
