Dusk fell over the valley of Mere like cold lye poured over a greasy hearthstone.
Prit stepped through the scorched porch arch of the watch-fort, his cut-down greatcoat buttoned up to his chin-bone and a coarse burlap sack tucked under his left arm. In his right hand he carried an ash-wood walking stave, notched every three inches to serve as an impromptu measuring rod.
Behind him, within the blue-lit recess of the hearth room, Noll Vey had settled into his evening silence. The showman was learning the first virtue of an unchartered core, which was simply remaining quiet while the mortar dried.
Prit took the switchback goat-path down the eastern face of the ridge. His short, dry leg-bones moved with rhythmic precision, his iron-rimmed boot heels clicking against the loose shale. The descent was three miles of steep, treacherous scree, where the stunted hazel bushes clung to thin soil and the mountain wind smelled of frozen bog-water.
To a mortal traveller with warm lungs and fragile tendons, the path was an hour of misery and skinned shins; to a two-foot bone steward whose joints had been seasoned by five centuries of municipal labor, it was merely an exercise in gradient calculation.
He reached the valley floor as the parish bell in Mere gave three dull, iron clangs for the evening curfew.
Mere was not an ancient city of proud spires and gilded gates. It was a cold, squalid border settlement of timber and slate, huddled along the bend of the river where the mountain gorge flattened into the peat flats. Its houses were built of split alder poles and rough-hewn limestone, their roofs thatched with river reeds that rotted into black mulch every three winters. The air hung thick with the reek of damp wood-smoke, sheep tallow, and the sulfurous stench of coal-slack drifting from the Crown silver-and-iron mine across the river.
Prit skirted the open commons, keeping to the shadows of the riverside timber mill.
The mill was silent for the night. The great waterwheel stood motionless, long icicles hanging from its dripping paddles like bearded teeth. Behind the saw-pit, where the scrap timber was piled in soggy heaps, Prit began his salvage survey.
He worked methodically, his yellow claws sifting through the frozen sawdust and wood-shavings.
A well-managed holding did not squander core credit on nails when an abandoned timber yard held iron for the taking. Within twenty minutes, his sharp eye-sockets had located fourteen dropped horseshoe nails—some bent, two rusted, but all capable of being straightened on a flat stone—and two clean blocks of hard lime clinker discarded beside the old slaking pit. In the corner by the wagon shed, he found a cracked slate roof tile, sixteen inches square, which had split down one edge but retained a smooth, unbroken face suitable for chalk notation.
He placed the fourteen nails, the two lime blocks, and the slate tile carefully into his burlap sack, noting the acquisition on the mental ledger of the fort’s material reserves.
Leaving the timber yard, Prit slipped through the narrow alley behind the blacksmith’s forge.
The forge had banked its fires, but the warmth still radiated through the rough stone walls, melting the slush in the ditch. From the shadow of the wood-pile, Prit paused to observe the town high street.
A dozen paces away stood the central market square, paved with uneven cobbles. In the center of the square rose the town’s primary water source: the iron market well.
It was an ugly, utilitarian structure. A heavy cistern of rusted boiler plate had been bolted to a foundation of river basalt, fed by a deep pipe driven forty fathoms into the shale below the valley floor. Three women in patched frieze cloaks stood by the trough, their knuckles red from the biting wind, waiting their turn at the iron crank.
An older woman hoisted a wooden bucket onto the stone coping, blowing into her cupped hands.
“The water tastes of old spades again tonight, Martha,” she complained, spitting into the gutter. “Red as ditch-rust and bitter enough to sour milk. My kettle has an inch of iron scale on the bottom that you could chip with a chisel.”
“It’s the deep drift at the pit, Mother Garrow,” the second woman replied, hauling on the creaking crank. “They broke into a wet seam on the fifth level yesterday. The bailiff has the drainage pumps clanking day and night, pumping the bilge straight into the river gravel. Everything that comes out of the mountain tastes of iron.”
Prit watched the reddish water splash into the bucket.
It was not merely drainage water from the silver pit. The water of Mere was heavy with dissolved pyrite and mineral salts, drawn from the deep strata where the ancient bedrock met the buried river. The folk of the valley had drunk it for generations, their teeth stained dull yellow and their joints stiffening before they reached forty winters.
Across the high street, opposite the well, stood the most imposing building in Mere: the Survey House of the March Ledger.
Unlike the timber hovels around it, the Survey House was built of dressed granite blocks hauled from the southern quarries, reinforced with iron strap-bars across the windows and roofed with heavy grey slate. The royal seal—the three-towered keep of Orren flanked by two crossed quill pens—was carved deep into the lintel above the double oak doors.
The shutters were bolted tight against the curfew, but behind the iron-barred fanlight over the transom, a pale tallow lamp burned.
Within that stone vault sat the Lord Auditor’s clerks, copying tax assessments, reviewing delve applications, and weighing the ore samples brought up from the Crown mine. To the folk of Mere, that building was the center of the kingdom—the place where their grain was counted, their debts recorded, and their sons drafted into the border levies.
A heavy, uneven tramping broke the silence of the lane.
Prit drew further back into the recess between the forge wall and a stack of hazel hurdles.
A squad of miners was coming off shift from the Crown silver-and-iron pit, trudging across the river footbridge toward the square. There were eight of them, their frieze smocks caked with grey rock-dust and coal soot, their boots bound with greasy rawhide strips to keep the soles from parting. Their shoulders were hunched against the freezing drizzle, their faces pale and hollowed by twelve hours spent in the dark drifts.
Among them walked Jori, the burly woodcutter, carrying a bundle of pit-props he had delivered to the lower timber shed earlier that afternoon.
“Did you hear it down in the sixth gallery today, Hob?” a young miner asked, rubbing his soot-blackened eyes with the back of a calloused hand. “Past the water sumps, where the seam narrows down to a crawl.”
“I heard the pumps,” an older miner growled, his voice thick with phlegm. “The pumps and the timber groaning under the ceiling. That’s all a sensible man listens for if he wants to see daylight again.”
“No,” the young man insisted, stopping by the well-curb to dip a tin cup into the trough. “It wasn’t the pumps. The pumps go clank-thud, clank-thud, regular as a cooper’s mallet. This was different. A deep, heavy bronze tolling. Like a church bell ringing in a cellar, three miles down under the shale.”
The older miner glanced nervously over his shoulder toward the shuttered windows of the Survey House, then leaned in close to the youth.
“Keep your tongue behind your teeth, lad,” he hissed in an urgent whisper. “The Survey clerks fine a man two days’ wage for spreading pit talk. The Lord Auditor says there’s nothing under the valley floor except limestone and bad water.”
“Then what is ringing?” the youth muttered, taking a swallow of the rusty water and grimacing at the taste. “There’s no church within ten leagues that has a bell that size. The parish chapel here only has a cracked iron chime no bigger than a kettle. But down on the sixth level, when you lay your ear against the bare rock wall, you can feel the bronze vibrating right through your teeth. A great, slow chime. Bong... bong... bong... Like an emperor being buried under the floor.”
“It’s just the water caverns, lad,” Jori said quietly, adjusting the load of timber on his shoulder. “Air pockets blowing out through the deep fissures when the river rises. That’s what my father always said.”
“Your father died coughing coal dust into a rag, Jori,” the youth retorted, tossing the remaining water into the slush. “And he swore the bells rang every time a man was about to be crushed in the drift.”
The group moved off into the dark, their heavy timber boots splashing through the icy puddles toward the miners’ tenements by the marsh.
Prit remained tucked in the shadow of the forge, his yellow skull tilted toward the flagstones.
He knew what the youth had heard. It was no air pocket, and it was no ghost of an emperor.
Far beneath the valley of Mere, deeper than the deepest gallery of the Crown silver pit, lay the ancient bedrock vault: the Hall of Witness. A buried municipal assembly hall, carved two centuries ago by the founders of Orren, whose massive bronze chorus bells had once rung to seal treaties between the seven dukes before the kings consolidated their monopoly over belief.
The bells hung in the dark water-vaults, untouched by human hands, yet they resonated whenever the pressure of unrecorded grief in the valley exceeded the strength of the rock.
The Crown knew they were down there. That was why the Survey House sat directly above the river crossing, and why the Lord Auditor forbade the miners from digging beyond the fifth level. The kingdom of Orren was terrified of what lay sleeping in the stone beneath its own ledger.
Prit hoisted his burlap sack onto his shoulder. The fourteen nails clinked faintly against the lime blocks.
He slipped out of the forge alley, crossed the ditch on a frost-covered cedar plank, and turned his boots back toward the northern ridge.
At the boundary post that marked the edge of the town—a square block of limestone carved with the King’s mark—Prit paused.
He set his walking stave against the frozen dirt and stood very still in the winter dusk.
Far below the soles of his boots, deep within the shale foundations of the valley, a sensation arose. It was not a sound that could be heard through the air; it was a low, seismic hum that resonated through bone. It climbed through the iron nail-heads of his boot soles, through the dry marrow of his shins, and settled into the base of his skull with a faint, tooth-deep ache.
Bong.
A single, muffled resonance, vast and ancient, vibrating through the cold rock of the mountain before dissolving into the murmur of the river.
Prit patted his breast pocket, where the oilskin roll of his dead masters rested warm against his ribs.
“Ring all you like, old bronze,” the imp whispered into the freezing wind. “I have two rooms to sweep and three shims to drive before midnight. The dead can wait until the accounts are balanced.”
He tightened his grip on his measuring stave and began the long climb back to the watch-fort.