The tremor did not rattle the roof slates, but Noll Vey felt it in the hollows behind his stone ribs, where the claim-ledger lived like a second pulse.
Down along the river flat, the portable register kept singing. It was not a sound that ordinary ears caught, yet through the Dominion ring connecting the fort to Mere’s iron well, it hummed like a wet finger circling the rim of a brass basin. Every three minutes another ripple went outward through the company tents. Outriders who had spent four days staring up the gulley at the blackened hill fort now set their tin cups on their knees, rubbed their eyes against the smoke haze, and found their thoughts smoothed flat.
They had not halted in terror before an unnamable beast. They had merely paused on the lower road for supply wagons to close up the rear. It was an orderly siege approach. The king’s officers were in firm control. The delay was logistical, nothing more.
In the Grand Hall, the numerals inscribed in white lime along the high east archway flickered and dropped.
WITNESS WEIGHT REDUCED ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY UNITS.
Noll stood beside the hearth where honest birch logs cracked in Ossa Flint’s iron firebox. His stone heels were planted deep into the mortar beds, his senses spread along the foundation corridors. Across the flagstones, Tessa Dene was wiping the edge of her salvage-iron bread knife with an oily scrap of hemp, her mouth set in a thin, grim line. Fen…
