Walk back up a steep hill in a body carved from quarry limestone, and you learn everything there is to know about your own masonry.
Noll Vey took the middle switchback at a measured trudge, his flat stone soles crunching through the grey slush of the cart track while Prit hopped from boulder to boulder beside his hip. Every third step, the mortar seam behind Noll’s left knee gave a faint, gritty squeak—a dry complaint that Tessa Dene had promised to pack with mutton tallow as soon as they reached the gate. Inside his carved ribcage, Core Chip #2 hummed against its copper seating like a tuning fork held between closed teeth.
Down in the valley, the four heavy grain wagons trailing Master Serit’s coach stood unhitched by the market well, their tarpaulins white with sleet. Mere had spoken aloud by the well curb. Three hundred throats had shouted twelve miners’ names back into Cale’s paling transit vouchers until the ink held fast, and the buried amphitheater under the hill still carried a warm hum in its deep limestone ribs.
Yet Lord Auditor Orin Vane had not raised his voice once. He had bowed from the Survey House steps, offered Master Serit his arm, and led the king’s envoy up the eastern gorge toward the Crown silver-iron mine before candles were lit for supper.
