The word came down the coast in a salt-hoy on the night tide. By the time the Patient Mary had her nose on the shingle at Saltern Edge, forty men had been under the cliff for a day and a half.It was a poor grey place. There was a row of cottages, a chapel the size of a boat-shed, and the pans where the brine was boiled, standing cold. The mine went into the foot of the cliff by a level adit that a cart could use. The whole village was on the beach in front of it, and nobody was digging.Ravel saw why as he waded in. A black pinnace lay drawn up above the weed. There was a rope across the mouth of the adit at the height of a man's chest. Behind the rope, sitting on kegs and upturned barrows with their dinners on their knees, were thirty of the Black Gannet Company."Corpse-captain," said Orsk Teal. He had a pasty in one hand. "You're early. They're not dead yet."A woman came down the shingle before Ravel could answer that. She was sixty and built like a bollard, with a pit-lamp hooke

He could have ordered it. Halvard Reem told him so that night on the roof, where Ravel had gone to think and found that he could only count."The fourth article gives the captain the direction of the company in the field," said the Magister. He had climbed the ladder with some dignity for a man made largely of bog-oak. "A lawyer would argue that a road is a field. I drafted it. I'd argue it for you, if you asked.""And the contract with the Ninth Gate?""Obliges us to carry their dead out of Khar Morn after the autumn, under truce. It says nothing of where we may stand before. I was careful about that. I thought you might be glad of it one day." The bark face turned toward him. "You have the law. You don't want it. May I ask why?"Ravel looked at the lamps of the bay for a while."Half of them joined to carry," he said. "The other half joined because the Church burned their street. Dob Carey can't tell his left foot from his right. I'm not marching him at a legion on the strength of a

Stormhold filled the valley from one cliff to the other. He had carried past it in another life, in the dark, with the place on fire, and had kept no notion of its size. It was a grey town built in steps up a rock where two rivers met. Round the foot of the rock ran a curtain wall, with a gate in it that would have taken four carts abreast. There was a camp on every scrap of level ground below. He stopped counting the cooking fires at about the number where Maren had.Nine thousand, the post-serjeant had said. The Prince had had two thousand when she wrote. The hill levies had come down since, with their own bows and their fathers' helmets. So had the League swords she had bought, and anybody else who would sooner fight in the Pass than at his own door. Perhaps three thousand of them had ever stood in a line.Three days in the valley had told him what kind of war it was. He had met the wounded coming down in ox-carts, twenty to a cart, with their feet hanging over the tailboards. He h

The Provost of the Field kept his office in a harness-room, and he kept it in a ledger. Ser Eadric Wystan was a thin, clerkly knight with ink on his cuffs and the look of a man who has not been to bed in a week because the sums would not let him."Pallbearers," he said. He did not look up at the eyes, or at Marta Flint in the doorway. He ran his pen down a column. "I am told that you fetch. Good. I have eleven hundred dead between this rock and the Throat, and four hundred spades, and half the spades are wanted for the ditch." The pen stopped. "I have also two assaults' worth lying out in front of the wall where no burial party will go. We call that ground the Strip. It is three hundred paces of nothing, with their bowmen at one end and ours at the other. I don't order you onto it. I haven't the right, and I have never had a company that would go. I mention that it's there.""We'll go and look at it," said Ravel."Then you'll want a pass for the upper road." He wrote one. He sanded it