The sound coming through the lower gallery door was neither a roar nor a stage sigh. It was the quiet, ragged hitch of someone sitting on the cold floor of a dark cupboard with his knees pulled up to his chest, trying to hold two incompatible pieces of himself together with bare hands.
Tessa Dene and Sella Rusk came down the stone steps side by side, their boots making almost no sound on the worn treads. Prit stood by the wall bracket, his slate lowered to his hip and his small bone ears drooped flat against his skull. Above the unmortared arch of the ninth door, the pale frost inscription had ticked down one more hour as the afternoon light began to fade outside:
LAST GUEST DEBT DUE IN ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-NINE HOURS.
“Talk to it, Noll,” Tessa whispered, stopping behind Prit’s white chalk line. Her eyes were fixed on the damp hairline seam at the base of the stone panel where the muffled weeping rose through the granite. “What happened when the soldiers crossed the yard?”
Noll Vey drew his awareness down to the gallery lip. Through the deep foundation stone of his Bastion ring, he could feel the ninth room vibrating like an iron boiler whose rivets were pulling two ways at once.
