The silence inside the Grand Hall grew so profound that the faint, regular ticking of Ossa Flint’s brass eye-harness sounded like a watchman’s hammer tapping against an iron rail.
Noll did not speak immediately. Inside the blue quartz core, his consciousness felt as though a cold, sharp needle had slipped between the crystalline layers of his memory. For weeks, ever since he had dragged his awareness up through the mortar and looked out at his own ruined hands buried in the ditch, he had told himself a simple, comforting story. He had told himself that he had died because he was a reckless gambler, because he had spent three crowns too many at the Red Swan tavern, and because debt collector Varn was a brutal man with a heavy oak cudgel and a short temper. He had treated his death as his own final, sloppy mistake—a miserable end to a third-rate life on the road.
Now, looking through the multifaceted glass lens inches from his face, he saw his death reflected as a set of finished shop drawings.
“You cut the stone,” Noll said at last, his mortar voice flat and hollow, stripped of all theatrical cadence. “Forty-two days before.”
