The low mason’s bench had been left behind by the wall-menders when the first hard frost set in—a five-foot plank of seasoned green ash resting across two dry mortar tubs filled with river gravel.
Noll Vey lowered himself onto the timber with great care, feeling the green ash groan beneath his four hundred pounds of quarry-dressed slate. He had to spread his knees wide so the thick, squared corners of his stone thighs would not pinch the copper nerve wires running down his pelvic seam. When his hips struck the timber, the ash baulk bowed two inches, but the gravel tubs held their ground with a dry, gravelly crunch.
He planted his flat slate soles squarely upon the gallery flags, rested his broad, spade-like forearms across his knees, and listened to the dry, mechanical hum of his drilled chest vents.
Inside the hollowed slate sternum, behind an iron latch secured with three bronze pins, the glowing blue splinter of Core Chip #2 pulsed with a steady, tranquil rhythm. It was a strange, split existence. Up in the western curtain wall, thirty paces distant, his primary core remained embedded in the foundation masonry, feeling the vast, cold envelope of the entire hill—the draft whistling through the gatehouse crenels, the slow seep of groundwater in the drainage culverts, the breathing of seventy sleeping refugees in the timber-and-slate cellars. Yet down here, seated on a carpenter’s plank three feet from the sealed ninth door, his immediate awareness was pinned inside two hundred pounds…
