The clapperless bell niche above the sealed stair smelled of cold copper, wet sheep wool, and centuries of undisturbed granite dust.
From his wall niche beside the gallery arch, Noll Vey stretched his Bastion awareness downward, feeling along the limestone risers as Prit, Cale, and Sergeant Berr began their descent. His stone-reach could follow the damp joints of the hill fort like blood through veins—so long as the mortar was his own. He felt the heavy scuff of Cale’s patched boots, the sharp, dry tap of Prit’s clawed heels, and the strange, hollow ring of Sergeant Berr’s restored bone feet, each step echoing through the masonry like a muffled hammer wrapped in flannel.
Ten yards below the gallery, where the fort’s foundation met the older, darker bedrock of the valley ridge, the character of the stone altered completely. The lime mortar Noll had mixed with sand and water gave way to dry-laid cyclopean blocks of slate-grey schist, so tightly fitted that three hundred years of groundwater had not forced a moss-root between the joints.
And there, forty feet below the hall floor, Noll’s vision began to blur.
It was not darkness. A dungeon core in Bastion rank did not require torchlight to see its own walls. It was the presence of an older boundary—a deep, dormant ward that had been laid into the roots of the hill long before the Crown built its watch-fort, and long before the thirty-year-old mass grave of Berr’s regiment had poisoned the soil. The boundary…
