The panic inside Noll Vey’s core was like cold water poured into a hot iron pot: a violent, hissing boiling that threatened to crack every seam in his western wall.
They planned it, his thoughts screamed through the dark mortar. They bought Varn. They hollowed out the stone. They set an octagon of red garnet in my back before I ever walked up this hill with holes in my boots!
He wanted to tear his awareness downward into the bedrock, rip through the barred threshold of the sealed stair, and batter the buried doors of the Hall of Witness until the mountain gave up the names of whoever had turned him into an animal in a harness.
“We go down,” Noll’s voice grated from the speaking crack, shaking loose a shower of dry lime onto the mantel. “Tessa, bring your iron pry-bar. Sella, get the crowbars from the niche. We break the floor of the inner corridor and we dig until we find the cable attached to this crimson thing in my spine.”
“You aren’t digging anything, Noll,” Tessa Dene said.
She was not looking at the wall. She stood by the Grand Hall archway, peering through the rain-streaked gap of the postern door toward the outer porch.
