The first stone struck beside the flour wagon and broke into three pieces. The second went through its canvas cover.
Mara heard the horse before she heard anyone shout: a short, furious scream, followed by the clatter of iron shoes. She turned from Sella’s dispatch table as the carter hauled on the reins. Flour rose through the torn canvas. For a moment the pale cloud concealed both his face and the bridge beyond him.
“Leave the reins long enough to let him stand,” Sella called. “He can’t turn there.”
Mara was already moving.
The morning queue filled the approach to Bellwether Bridge: two vegetable carts, a wagon of flour, handbarrows with milk cans, pedestrians squeezing along the parapet. Across the narrow ravine, the lower terrace’s ovens had begun to smoke. Above them, Ordel rose in successive walls and roofs until the highest buildings disappeared behind the escarpment’s shoulder.
Another fragment clicked onto the paving.
“Everybody behind the blue post,” Mara said.
A woman carrying a sleeping child looked toward the far end of the bridge.
“This side,” Mara told her. “Go behind me.”
She put herself between the woman and the flour wagon, then pointed two boys away from the parapet. They obeyed when she took out her municipal badge. The carter was still trying to reach the horse’s head.
“Stay by his shoulder. Is anyone under the wagon?”
“No.”
“Look.”
He bent, swore, and straightened. “Nobody.”
A milk porter had blood on his wrist. Mara caught his sleeve before he wiped it against his apron. A shallow cut, with no stone lodged in it. He could move every finger. She gave him her handkerchief and told him to press it down.
“Anyone else struck?”
People examined themselves as though injury required permission to appear. The carter touched his scalp. Flour came away on his fingers, without blood.
Sella arrived with the dispatch bell and rang it three times. The vegetable carts stopped. Behind them, someone began complaining about the delay.
“Keep ringing when another wagon comes,” Mara said.
“What fell?”
“Facing stone. I haven’t seen behind it.”
She crouched short of the scattered pieces. The fresh break was dark with damp. Above, a shallow wound opened beneath the approach cornice, exposing rough backing where a dressed block had come away. There was no broad rupture through the arch. No continuing shower of grit.
That was something. It was not enough.
On the warehouse wall, beside the bridge, a brass survey stud caught the light. Mara sighted from it toward the striped target fixed to the approach beam. She knew the bridge’s usual line; she had checked it in spring. With the flour wagon where it stood, the target ought to have appeared lower.
She took a step sideways and looked again.
Sella followed her gaze. “Can we back him out?”
“Not loaded.”
“Backing is six paces.”
“And a frightened horse pulling against a wheel in a rut. We unload here.”
Sella looked at the sacks showing through the torn cover. Then she turned toward the queue.
“Four porters. No barrows. Put the sacks by the blue post, clear of the drain.”
“Wait,” Mara said. “Your ledger first.”
Her sister’s expression changed.
“I need what was on the bridge when it moved.”
“You’ve seen it.”
“I need the weights before anyone divides the load.”
Sella went back to her table without answering.
By the time she returned, Mara had kept a porter from climbing onto the wagon. They would lift from the tailboard, two at a time, with nobody beneath the damaged cornice. The horse stood trembling, its ears working backward at every scrape.
Sella opened her ledger against the wagon’s rear wheel. Beside each consignment she had written its destination and the charges still owing. Several amounts were crossed out and replaced in smaller figures.
“Thirty sacks,” she said. “Fortyweight each. Wagon tare, eight hundred and sixty. Driver, no declared weight.”
“One hundred and fifty,” the carter said.
Sella looked at him.
“One hundred and seventy, then.”
Mara copied the figures, adding the horse separately and drawing a little plan of the wheel positions. Behind the flour entry, Sella had written: North ovens—six households paid Friday. Beneath the milk deliveries were names rather than shops.
“Who certifies your scales?” Mara asked.
“Municipal weights office. The stamp’s on the back.”
“I’ll need the number.”
“You can have the whole blessed stamp if it gets this flour moving.”
The porters began. Each sack made a soft, bodily sound as they set it down beyond the post.
Mara watched the striped target. As the load diminished, it rose, but by less than she expected.
A patrol keeper arrived with a folded preliminary notice. Someone at the watch station had reported the fall as soon as the bell sounded. He handed it to Mara, relieved to find an investigator already there.
“Approach failure,” he said. “Watch reckons the west footing’s gone.”
The form contained a rough estimate of the queued loads and a predicted settlement copied from the bridge’s emergency table: eleven to fourteen divisions at the approach target.
Mara looked from the paper to the beam.
She had seen perhaps four.
“Where did the footing report come from?”
“Man across the ravine saw stone fall.”
“Did he see the footing?”
The keeper glanced toward the drop. “I’ll ask.”
“Do that. Until then, the footing condition is unconfirmed.”
She spoke carefully enough that he repeated the word under his breath.
This is the end of the opening excerpt. Edition options confirm the full EPUB’s language, price and supported purchase regions.
