By one o’clock in the morning, the vibration rising through the hill’s limestone spine had settled into a steady, grinding purr that felt like a dentist’s drill working three rooms away.
Noll Vey stood at the threshold of the scriptorium alcove, his broad stone hands braced against the dressed ashlar jambs while he tried to shield the inner wall with his own Bastion foundation weight. Since earning his fourth rank and the heavy stone host body that walked his halls, Noll could shift structural load from one pillar to another, deaden the impact of an artillery round against the outer rampart, or send his voice humming down sixty yards of mortared drainage pipe.
Against the thing humming in the Survey House basement, however, throwing up a stone wall was like trying to stop the smell of frying onions by locking the cellar padlock.
The Master Oath-Silver Register Core—Anchor Number Two of Vane’s valley-wide collar array—was not throwing iron cannonballs against the hill fort’s masonry. It was pulling on a legal and material tether that was already inside the room. Every sheet of March Ledger foolscap that Cale had carried up the hill in his oilskin satchels had been milled at the Crown paper-works in Greyford with a thread of silver-wire watermark woven into the rag pulp, and every word upon those sheets had been written in Survey House gall ink compounded with powdered oath-silver dross.
