When the last name on the Hill War roster had been spoken and answered, Noll Vey checked the quiet arithmetic at the center of his blue stone.
Points earned since sunrise: zero.
New claims entered: zero.
Stored Threshold reserve remaining: twenty-eight points and a handful of loose copper-weight fractions left over from last week’s tourist delves.
By every rule Noll had lived by when he owned two knees, a velvet coat with three brass buttons, and a painted wooden wand, a morning performance that drew nine locals, cost a bucket of hot willow tea, put his best people on a state black-list, and brought in not a single farthing of revenue was an unmitigated disaster. It was the sort of Tuesday matinee in a sheep-market town after which you packed the bent mirror into the pine crate before the landlord woke up from his nap and went over the back wall into the nettles.
Yet as Noll looked out through the damp mortar seams of his courtyard at eight o’clock in the winter morning, the stone around his core hummed with a deep, settled warmth that no paid lie had ever given him.
Out on the road beyond the granite boundary posts, Lord Auditor Orin Vane’s young copying clerk was hurriedly screwing the brass cap back onto his iron inkhorn, folding his ashwood camp stool under his arm, and tucking the sanded roll of nine town names inside his grey wool coat. He did not linger to give a closing…
