The bedrock under the old royal seat did not carry sound the way tavern pine or ditch timber did. It held vibrations in long, frozen tremors, like iron bells struck under ten fathom of pond ice.
Through the new Bastion reach of his awareness, Noll Vey followed the cold granite veins two hundred feet beneath the Grand Hall. The stone down here had never felt mortar, nor had it answered to a mason’s pick. It was deep foundation rock, dense and grey, groaning under the immense mass of the ridge above. At the bottom of the narrow drainage channel where Prit had led them, the air tasted of ancient lime, wet quartz, and the faint, dry copper scent of spent magic.
Before them lay Master Number Four.
The blue core had been split cleanly in half forty winters ago. The two halves rested in a shallow hollow chipped out of the bedrock floor, tilted against each other like the broken shells of a river mussel. The polished facets had long lost their inner azure sheen. They were milky, scratched with grit, and filmed over with the powdery white crust of lime seepage. Yet directly behind the fracture line, where the two shattered halves leaned against the living wall of the channel, the stone did not end where an honest chisel said it should.
