The three-notched iron key lay on the pine worktable in the Grand Hall, freshly wiped of culvert mud, looking no more impressive than the key to a cheap tin cashbox in a country tavern.
Yet Noll Vey could feel the shape of those three square teeth in the deepest fissure of his blue core.
Down beneath his twenty-two stored claim credits, beneath the warm hearth bond and the threshold gate wards, the red collar seal that Ossa Flint’s craft and Orin Vane’s malice had planted at his death gave a dull, rhythmic throb against the surrounding limestone. It was like having a bad tooth that had ached so long you forgot what your jaw felt like without it—until somebody walked into the room holding a pair of iron forceps.
“Pick it up, Tessa,” Noll said from the western wall, and he could hear the rush in his own mortar-voice, fast and eager as a man who had just drawn the third ace in a three-card game. “Look at the lower left facet of my niche, right where the red vein meets the copper wire. There’s a square dimple in the stone no wider than a bodkin. I always thought it was a quarry flaw where the chisel slipped. It isn’t a flaw. It’s the keyhole.”
