The white truce flag came back up the carriage road three quarters of an hour after it had vanished into the sleet.
From the gatehouse arch, Noll watched through mortar seams as Tomas climbed the muddy grade. The carter’s head was down against the driving drizzle, the collar of his sheepskin coat pulled up to his ears. The ash rake handle was tucked beneath his arm like an old broom, the white linen rag dripping muddy water onto gravel. He was not running, and no cavalry pursued him. Crown pickets had simply watched him turn around at the three-hundred-pace post and walk away.
Beside the core chamber in the lower cellar, Prit stared at the ledger slate.
“Nothing,” the goblin muttered, bone claw tracing the cold edge of stone. “Zero inflow. Not a flicker. Not a single grain of credit has entered the reservoir.”
“Wait until he speaks,” Noll whispered back through foundation rock. “The message may have only reached the staff tent. Gant might still be consulting his diagrams.”
“If Gant were frightened, the stone would know,” Prit said, his voice flat with clinical certainty. “The ledger does not wait for a messenger to walk up a hill. The moment an engineer reads a line and imagines forty-five thousand gallons of sludge rushing down his trench, his gut clenches. That clench is belief. That clench registers as a quarter-point of pressure in the core. But this stone is as dead as a winter ditch.”
