Cold spring water ran down the back of Noll Vey’s limestone collar and drained out through the mortar gap behind his left knee.
If he had still owned human skin, he would have been shivering hard enough to rattle his teeth out of his gums. Even inside six hundredweight of quarried stone, the west mill culvert was a miserable place to spend an evening. A forty-foot vertical cleft of wet grey granite rose from the lower town grain drain up to the sheep-pen crags, slick with black moss and smelling of rotted beech leaves, old ditch silt, and the tallow candles burning inside Renn’s wire horn-lanterns.
Clang. Clang. Crunch.
Thirty feet up the shaft, standing on the second staging ledge with his broad limestone boots wedged into two side-wall crevices, Noll drove the chisel point of his forty-pound iron crowbar into a natural frost seam in the granite.
Through the soles of his feet and the palms of his carved hands, he drew on the Bastion load-shaping of the hill—strictly the physical masonry leverage that belonged to his fourth rank, with zero stage smoke and zero borrowed belief. He did not tell the granite that it was soft clay. He did not whisper to the dark that a royal staircase had stood here since the founding dukes. Instead, he poured raw structural pressure into the water-logged quartz vein, feeling the stubborn mountain rock grind back against his core before a four-inch block of grey stone sheared loose and dropped into…
