“Heel!” Noll shouted, throwing his voice through every seam, every chimney flue, and every floor joist in the common hall. “Down, you brute! Sit! By the right of occupancy and the law of this hearth, I command you to stand down!”
The sound reverberated through the room with the force of a church bell rung in an empty cellar, but the rubble hound did not twitch a single slate scale.
Its limestone flank remained rigid, its flint-toothed jaws parted in that steady, gravelly hiss. The command meant less than the wind in the chimney.
Noll felt a sudden, sickening realization settle into his core.
In his mortal life, when he sold a horse with spavin or a watch with a wooden balance wheel, he had always known where the trick failed. He knew which bolt was loose; he knew which rope would snap. But a claim-ledger lie had no slack. It had no room for unstated intentions.
On his first night, bleeding on the cellar flags, he had told the starving fox: A fierce guard hound sleeps in the stone, sworn to drive every red thief from the threshold.
He had never told the fox that the hound was his. He had never said the dog was trained to his whistle, or answered to the name of Noll Vey, or obeyed the master of the house. He had simply asserted that a hound existed, that it lived in the wall, and that its purpose was the destruction of foxes. The…
