When the grey dawn crept over the snow-covered courtyard, Noll Vey learned what honest labor without an audience felt like inside forty thousand tons of stone.
It did not feel like exhaustion in two mortal knees. It felt like an iron hoop shrinking around a dry barrel.
Through the night, cutting the crawlway beneath the frost line to the shepherd’s washing trough had burned through the last of his stored craft reserve. The blue light that had once pooled in the cellar cistern was gone, reduced to a faint, sullen coal no larger than an acorn buried deep in the heart of his Seed-rank gem. Without the pressure of that stored force pushing back against the earth, the weight of the hill settled directly onto the masonry joints. Noll felt every cubic yard of wet clay, frozen shale, and packed gravel pressing inward, squeezing the lime mortar in the foundation seams until the lime wept fine white powder onto the cellar flags.
Above, on the second tier of the inner keep, the Room of Mirrors sat in total darkness.
The polished glass panels—which on good delve afternoons caught the western sun and threw sparkling diamond lattices across the gallery vaults—were cold, blind slabs of grey sheet glass. The blue decorative flames that had flickered behind the bevels were dead. When Noll tried to extend his sight down the long corridor, his perception rebounded off the cold plaster, fuzzy and dim, like looking through oiled calfskin smeared with soot.
