Chapter 2: Ten Thousand Without a Lord

The water schedule was wrong again.

Aldric Stonehaven crouched beside the eastern distribution table — two planks laid across salvaged barrels, the kind of construction that would have embarrassed a City Watch quartermaster but kept four hundred people from fighting over buckets — and traced the error with his finger. Someone had transposed the morning and midday rotations for District Seven, which meant two hundred and thirty people had walked to the well at the wrong hour and found it occupied by District Three, which meant what had been a rotation had become a confrontation, which meant Brenys Cole had spent the better part of the morning standing between two crowds instead of supervising the northern corpse removal he'd been assigned.

"Who wrote this," Aldric said.