The sound had been there for three days, but Noll Vey had mistaken it for the wind in the chimney flues.
It was not wind. When a gale blew down off the high northern passes, the air in the fort’s masonry wavered with a hollow, breathing whistle that rose and fell with the gusts. This vibration was constant, low, and metallic, humming at the absolute bottom of the stone like an iron harp string struck in an empty cellar and left to ring forever.
In his Bastion awareness, Noll followed the tremor downward from the ninth door into the old mine galleries beneath the western spur.
Forty feet below the lower cellar passage, where the hill fort’s foundations rested on the exhausted Crown silver drifts, Tessa Dene and her father Edren were walking through ankle-deep water in the abandoned drainage cut. With them came Renn, his glass-fused knee joints squeaking faintly in the cold damp, and Ossa Flint, whose brass jeweler’s lens gleamed yellow in the reflection of Edren’s oil lantern.
“Mind the header-timbers, Father,” Tessa said, ducking beneath a bowed baulk of rotting pine that was furred with white cellar mold. “The rock is taking water from the north ditch. Look at the lime-crust along the seam.”
