The West Gate of Bellwether, through which kings, high prelates, and victorious hero companies had entered for three hundred years, stood wide open under the afternoon sky. The massive drop-gate of banded iron was hoisted high into its stone housing, secured with two safety pins of forged steel that were locked with padlocks whose keys hung in the public hall.
At the side of the archway. There, the narrow, foul-smelling back gate had once forced porters and manual laborers into the muddy service alleys, a stone tablet had been set into the cut stone wall at eye level. It bore a single sentence, cut deep into the limestone and filled with black lead:
The city enters through one door.
Tomas stopped before the arch. He looked up at the high stone vaulting where the carved lions of the old dynasty stared down at the traffic. In his early years as an Uncalled youth, a watchman with an iron-tipped pike would have blocked his chest, ordering him to take his stink and his cargo around to the rear incinerator court. He had spent hundreds of hours in the rain outside this very gate. He waited for a clerk to sign a three-silver coin delivery receipt while nobles in velvet rode past on caparisoned geldings.
