The chill in the deepest bedrock cellar tasted of old iron and wet lime.
Thirty feet beneath the hearth hall, the blue light of Noll Vey’s core facet pooled in shallow cracks like water trapped in morning frost. Through thirty feet of shale, the mountain transmitted every tremor from the ridge: the dull thuds of Crown sappers driving sighting stakes, the clatter of trace chains as siege guns were hauled into pits, and the scrape of ninety frightened townsfolk shifting on straw pallets overhead.
Sergeant Berr had retreated into the unmortared drift, motionless where the passage choked out against raw granite, his hand on the pommel of his notched broadsword.
That left only the core and the imp.
Prit sat on a three-legged stool near the cold well riser, hunched over a slab of river slate. He held a piece of sandstone, methodically grinding down the chalk tallies from yesterday’s audits. Grey powder drifted over his leather breeches. His yellow eyes remained on the slate, but his notched ears twitched at every pulse from the sapphire facet.
“You are humming in the mortar again, master,” Prit said, his voice grating like dry roof tiles. “You have hummed that same three-note cadence for half an hour. It shakes lime dust loose from the arch every time you hit the low pitch.”
