Up on the bottom riser of the cellar stair, Hobb quietly picked up his empty copper pot and his long brass ladle, gave Noll’s limestone shoulder a respectful tap of farewell, and tiptoed back up toward the kitchen before the door could ask him why the barley had lacked nutmeg.
Noll Vey did not blame him. Even inside seven hundred pounds of quarried limestone, hearing the ninth door answer back in plain speech made the blue core facet in his chest hum like a tuning fork struck against an anvil.
He stayed on one stone knee before the bog-oak panels. Beside him, Tessa Dene lowered herself onto the bottom step with the pitch-pine torch wedged securely into an iron wall-ring above her head, leaving both her hands free. Prit sat on the flagstone near the linen napkin where the crooked iron soup spoon rested, his slate propped against his shin and his grey chalk held ready between his dry finger-bones.
“You have been listening through the floor,” Noll said to the narrow seam between the oak jamb and the granite sill.
“The stone carries everything down,” the Last Guest replied from the dark.
Its voice had the strange, patient rhythm of a choir that had never rehearsed together yet knew the same hymn by heart. Underneath the main cadence—which was cool and level, like water running under river ice—Noll could catch the faint, overlapping timber of individual anxieties that had seeped down from the valley: a young pikeman’s terror of…
