Crown-Reach didn’t welcome travelers with open fields or village commons. It confronted them with a wall of white cut stone stonework forty feet high, pierced by the iron-plated archway of the North King’s Gate. Inside the walls, the city rose in climbing nested terraces of polished granite, copper-domed guildhouses, and the huge classical rows of stone pillars of the Financial Ward. Unlike Bellwether. There, everyone could feel the honest stink of river silt, boiled cabbage, and tanned cowhide, Crown-Reach smelled of sea-coal smoke, fine pipe tobacco, horse manure swept into gutters by liveried sweepers. The dry, powdery aroma of newly cut rag paper.
Tomas Reed walked at the head of the thirty freight wagons, his ash pack-frame strapped firmly to his shoulders, the iron heel-plates of his boots clicking sharply on the broad granite flat stone slabs of the High Way. Beside him, Hester Quill walked with her ivory folio-knife in her gloved hand, her dual-lens glasses catching the cold, pale glare of the winter afternoon. Behind them, forty independent watchmen marched in four tight files, their tall oak body-shield shields held ready. That kept the curious, well-dressed crowds of the capital at a respectful three paces.
“Look up at the pediments, Tomas,” Hester said. He pointed with her ivory blade toward the massive Corinthian roofed porch of the Exchange of Gilded Bills. “Every column of that building was carved from marble imported from the southern sea-provinces. Above the frieze, carved in gold relief, is the goddess of Fortune holding…
