The voice that echoed off the firebrick walls of the eight-sided chamber was not distorted by an iron grate. It wasn’t muffled by rushing water.
It was an exact sound reproduction of Len’s own voice. The flat, cautious northern vowels, the slight rasp of a nineteen-year-old throat dried by winter road dust. That specific, hesitant rising inflection he used whenever he spoke to Cira across the kitchen ledger at Cloudford after a hard run down from the high passes.
“You should have taken the gold from Pell, Lenny,” the double said, its head leftover tilted toward its left shoulder, its hands resting motionless on the cast-iron spokes of the bypass wheel. “Fifty sovereigns in a velvet bag. You could have bought two sound draft mules in Cross-Hollow. You could have paid the interest on the mortgage to the northern creditors before the winter muster.”
Len didn’t answer.
He didn’t draw a ragged breath, and he didn’t allow his boots to shift on the firebrick threshold.
A courier who answered a challenge in the dark surrendered his single advantage: sound ambiguity. The creature knew he was in the entrance chimney pipe. But it didn’t have an exact spatial lock on his skull. It was relying on verbal response to calibrate the distance for a zero-drag lunge across the burning plates.
