The sudden release in the center of Noll Vey’s blue core felt like an iron hoop snapping off a swollen beer barrel.
For five days, since Ossa Flint had crept through the sheep-pen grain drain with culvert mud in her hair, the red collar seal buried in the fort’s stone heart had tightened around his awareness. It had been a dull, greasy ache deep in the limestone—a tether anchoring him to the silver-iron workings down in the valley. Then, precisely at the moment the valley sun touched the second drainage weir, the tether gave a violent, singing twang and went slack. The carmine thrum died down to a faint, cold whisper.
COLLAR ANCHOR ONE — MINE CHORUS BELL — FIELD DISCHARGED AND DIMMED REMAINING ACTIVE ANCHORS: TWO CORE BURDEN: TWENTY CLAIM CREDITS HELD IN RESERVE
At the main gate arch of the fort, Noll did not allow so much as a pebble to rattle in the masonry.
He kept his attention anchored in the speaking slit above the outer lintel, where Sergeant Berr and two Crown road guards stood squinting into the cold morning wind. On the timber bench beside the ditch, Cale sat with a thick ledger open on his knees, his brass-tipped pen scratching across damp vellum with relentless, infuriating regularity. Beside him stood Prit, the small bone imp balancing on a peck basket of dry turnips, his grey audit chalk poised above a slate ruled into fifty narrow columns.
