The charcoal drawing on the workbench had the clean, severe geometry of a siege tower, though it was scarcely taller than an ordinary man.
Ossa Flint kept her brass lens screwed tight into her right eye socket, her thumb holding down the curled edge of sheepskin parchment where oil from an iron hinge had stained the corner. Beside her, Prit had arrayed his chalks in a neat row upon the table slate: the white for honest masonry tallies, the red for structural hazard, and the blunt stub of grey he reserved for audit debt.
“It is not an illusion, Master Noll,” Ossa said, tapping the drawing with a brass-tipped compass. “That is the first thing your council must understand. If we used claim-force or stage misdirection to knit stone together, the first step you took into the outer Hall would shatter the ankles beneath you. The Hall of Witness does not recognize painted canvas or borrowed air. A standing speaker must possess actual mass, actual hinges, and a lawful center of gravity.”
“Actual mass,” Noll repeated through the mortar crack above the workbench. Through his Bastion stone-reach, he could feel the cold slate tabletop, the scratch of the compass point, and the damp chill rising through the flagstones from the lower drifts. “I was never known for heavy mass when I had boots on, Ossa. Half of my trade was convincing bailiffs that I weighed less than the bail they set.”
