The gatehouse was a real building.
James had not expected that to matter and it did. After two hours of caravan road and dry riverbed and a stone corridor with things living in the walls, the Eastern Gatehouse was a curtain wall twelve metres high with two square towers on it and a paved yard behind the doors, and the paving had been swept.
There were men on the wall head with bows. There were more in the yard, in mail, and two of them took the horses off Finn without being asked and had the harness off the bay's shoulders inside a minute. Somebody came out of a doorway with a bucket.
Behind them, out through the open doors, the badlands went away west in the late sun — flat, ochre, enormous, with the notch of the pass a dark line in it about a kilometre off.
The wagon sat where it had stopped with a hole in the roof and a wheel that did not match.
James stood and listened to the horses breathe.
