Dawn came through the eastern treasure-lens window the color of cold turnip water, and with it the tooth-aching hum in the hill’s bedrock finally dropped away.
Noll Vey felt the cutoff through his flat limestone soles before the candle flame on the reading desk even finished straightening its wick. Half a mile down the slope, in the vaulted sub-cellar of the Survey House, Lord Auditor Orin Vane’s technicians had thrown the main damper lever on the Master Oath-Silver Register Core—either because its copper cooling jackets had boiled dry after five hours of continuous full-draw pressure, or because the seven o’clock breakfast bell was about to ring at the King’s Horn Coaching Inn and Vane had to carry whatever he had managed to manufacture across the street to Master Serit’s table.
In the center of the Grand Hall, Sergeant Berr waited three full breaths after the floor stopped humming. Then, with a dry click of his knuckle-plates, the dead sergeant lifted his gauntleted right hand from the middle of the twelve-inch iron ruler.
Nobody spoke right away. Mainly, Noll thought as he looked around the hearth circle through his stone eyes, that was because scarcely anyone in the room had enough spit left in their mouth to make a consonant.
