The bent iron soup spoon on the flagstone outside the ninth door was still humming when Noll Vey turned his heavy basalt shoulders toward the deeper stair.
It was a small, domestic sound—the faint clink of metal against black glass as the thing behind the oak panels practiced holding a utensil without snapping the handle—and it followed them down through the cold limestone like a cricket in a baker’s wall. Ahead of Noll, Prit descended one high step at a time, his moth-eaten steward’s coat gathered around his knees so the hem would not drag through the damp stone dust. Tessa Dene walked on Noll’s left with her horn lantern held low, the yellow tallow light catching the scarred knuckles of her hand and the worn wooden handle of the salvage bread knife tucked into her belt. Behind them, Cale carried two oiled leather satchels stuffed with the market-square tallies from Mere, his boots slipping whenever the ancient chisel marks on the risers wore smooth.
Noll’s carved host body took the grade with a dull, measured thud that vibrated up through his ankles and into the blue facet set inside his stone breastbone. After thirty-odd hours in the shell, he had stopped expecting his knees to ache when the weather turned, though he still missed the small warning twinge that used to tell him when a creditor or a rainstorm was coming up the road. He had thirteen hundred points of stored falsehood banked inside the hill’s masonry, a civic…
