Prit stood up from the flagstone, tucked his slate neatly under his left arm-bone, and walked three small, clicking paces forward until his dry toes rested directly beside Hobb’s folded linen napkin.
The bone imp was barely three feet tall from the crown of his yellowed skull to his heels, and beside Noll Vey’s kneeling seven-hundred-pound limestone shell he looked like a bundle of winter kindling tied together with old parchment cord. Yet when Prit set his grey audit chalk into the leather loop at his hip and faced the bog-oak planks of the ninth door, he carried the quiet authority of an archivist who had balanced the books at six funerals before anyone in Mere had been born.
“They will feel hollow,” Prit said clearly into the narrow gap beneath the bottom rail.
Behind the heavy oak door, the layered breathing of the unseen room went still.
“Not all of them at the same hour,” the imp continued, his jaw clicking with dry, unhurried precision. “The boys who were dragged out of the turnip fields last month with a pressed shilling in their pockets will throw their pikes into the ditch and run home singing. The structure has not had time to grow into their ribs. For the older men—the sergeants who have eaten out of the same tin mess-kettle for twenty winters, the captains who only know whether they are honest men by looking at the commission seal in their saddle-bags, the clerks who have spent half their…
