Noll Vey had spent fifty-one years in a human body hating silence, and now that he was five hundred tons of dressed hill-stone, he found he hated it worse.
While Tessa, Edren, and Cale walked down the winding cart track toward Mere’s market square, Noll pressed his awareness as far into the southern bedrock spurs as his Bastion reach would carry. He could not see the market well directly with his damp-mortar sight—the town square lay three hundred paces outside his claimed threshold—but the deep limestone shelf beneath the valley acted like the sounding board of an enormous, buried lute. Every heavy boot-tread around the iron well-curb, every rumble of a blocked grain wagon at the bridge, and every clear voice that struck the remaining window-tokens along the high street echoed faintly back up the stone channels to the gatehouse speaking horn.
Prit sat on the stone mounting-block just inside the gate arch, his ears cocked toward the flared iron mouth of the listening tube Ossa Flint had helped them brace into the foundation seam.
“How many in the square?” Noll asked quietly, careful to pitch his mortar-crack voice inward so not a syllable leaked down the hill.
“Four hundred at least, Master,” Prit murmured, his white chalk poised over the corner of his slate, though he made no mark. “The woodcutters from the upper timber camp have come down with their axes strapped to their packs. The weavers are standing by the horse trough. Reeve Dena Holt has had…
