“The clerk has already heard the truth of it,” the Last Guest said, its voice brushing through the stone seam with a heavy, sorrowful resonance. “He does not need to guess what happens in the valley tents. I have been listening to them for seventy-two hours.”
Noll leaned forward on the mason’s bench, his slate wrists resting on his knees. “Tell us what you heard, Guest. Do not spare our feelings.”
“It happens every night at the change of the watch,” the Guest replied. “Down in the command pavilion, where the charcoal brazier burns red and the guards stand with drawn broadswords outside the canvas, Lord Auditor Orin Vane sits at his walnut desk. When Captain Dorn or Major Brek steps into the light to ask about the twelve miners who died in the lift shaft, Vane looks them in the eye and tells them that the men were lawful volunteers who signed the Crown labor roll of their own free will.”
A low, vibrating shudder passed through the floor of the gallery, rattling Prit’s lime bucket and setting the oil in Tessa’s tallow lamp trembling.
“Whenever Vane speaks that sentence,” the Guest continued, “the discord in the rock is so violent that my teeth ache in the dark. It is like an iron wagon wheel dragging across bare granite with the linchpin sheared away. His mind holds the memory of the iron chains he ordered forged for their ankles. He remembers the forged marks he stamped upon their muster…
