The kettle-drum struck, and Noll Vey threw his voice into the iron throat of the gatehouse horn.
It was not a roar; it was the practiced, resonant baritone of a man who had spent thirty years learning how to fill a crowded market square against rain and the braying of pack-mules. He did not push the sound from his lungs—he had no lungs now, only the cold, vibrating chambers of the Bastion-rank core—but he shaped the frequencies through the lead pipes, sending them down through the foundation bed into the valley floor.
Two miles away, the sixty clay tokens on sixty frost-bitten windowsills began to speak at the same instant.
Because the tokens sat outside the wooden shutters on the common road ledges, the sound did not enter a single parlor or wake a sleeping child in its crib. It rolled down the highway ditch like a slow wave of thunder, gathering weight as it passed the tannery, the mill race, and the cooper’s yard, until the entire eastern hillside seemed to be speaking with one massive, unhurried voice.
“Officers and men of the Crown muster,” Noll spoke, the words echoing off the granite crags above Mere. “Halt your teams at the ditch. Lay your sighting stakes on the turf and listen to the ground under your boots.”
