The lower workroom beside the cistern smelled of wet iron filings, mutton tallow, and the sour coal clinker Ossa Flint used to test draft pressure in cracked masonry.
Noll Vey stood at the head of the trestle table in his basalt body, his heavy grey forearms planted on the pine planks on either side of a four-foot slate smeared with fresh white chalk. Across from him, Ossa leaned low over the board, the brass rim of the glass lens over her empty left socket clicking whenever she tilted her head to sight along a ruler. To her right, Hobb stood with his flour-dusted apron tied high under his ribs and an iron ladle tucked through his belt loop like a cavalry saber. Prit perched on an upturned salt keg at the table’s corner, his three chalk stubs—white, grey, and red—laid out in a neat row beside the master household ledger.
Up in the Grand Hall and down in the dark corridor before the ninth door, the maturity counter ticked down another notch. One hundred and one hours remained. Four days and five hours before the Last Guest’s due span came round in full.
“You are proposing,” Ossa said, not looking up as her brass dividers pricked three measured points along the chimney sketch, “to engineer your own obsolescence in the middle of a siege. As a technical problem, it is fascinating. As a survival instinct, it ranks somewhere below the marsh-hare that sits on a lantern to warm its tail.”
