The cold drafts in the Grand Hall ceased their whistling, though the frost along the lower edges of the lime-washed stones did not melt.
Sergeant Berr remained where he stood, balanced on his two bare feet of ancient bone, his right hand still resting against the bright blue knot of wool at his throat. The left half of his rib cage and the curve of his shoulder blade still drifted in translucent smoke, flickering like a tallow candle guttering in an autumn cellar. But his skull did not droop. His dark eye sockets remained level, staring across the flags directly into the glowing blue quartz patch where Noll Vey’s consciousness resided.
Noll felt the deep, steady pulse of his granite foundation humming beneath the flagstones. The urge to speak a quick, binding sentence—the cheap theatrical instinct to solve every wound with a theatrical trick—still twitched at the edges of his mortar lips, but he clamped down on it until the stone went cold.
“Sella is right,” Noll said, his voice coming low and rough from the wall. “And you are right, Berr. I spent thirty years treating people like marks on a county fair midway. I treated them like ears waiting for a song, or gullible fools who deserved to be parted from their pennies because they wanted to believe a tin ring was pure silver. When I woke up in this wall, I thought the only way to keep anyone alive was to keep running the same game, just…
