The charcoal on Ossa Flint’s drawing was still tacky enough to smear if a thumb pressed too hard against the vellum.
Noll Vey kept three points of his awareness gathered in the hearth mantel, watching the parchment lie flat between two iron candlesticks on the long table. The smell of grease from the outer culvert clung to the edges of the roll, mingling with the dry, chalky air of the hall and the scent of cold tea from Tessa Dene’s tin mug. In the center of the diagram, drawn with the ruler-straight lines of a woman who measured human grief in foot-pounds and grain weights, sat the crystalline lattice of Noll’s own blue core.
Around the outer facets ran the red collar ring. Inside that ring, barbed like a fishhook and notched with six tiny conduit pins, lay the release mark.
“It is an override,” Prit said. The bone imp had climbed onto a stool at the corner of the table, his oilskin satchel resting against his knee. He did not touch Ossa’s sketch. Instead, he unfastened the horn buttons of the packet with small, precise snaps. “My fifth master was called Iron-Vow. It was an armory core established during the middle border troubles, twenty-two winters back, in the granite gorge six miles north of High Crag.”
