The smell of damp slate dust was thicker in the outer hall than the smell of woodsmoke from the stoves.
Noll Vey stood beneath the ribbed barrel vaulting of the entry gallery, his rough-chiseled limestone body half-shadowed by the archway. His hands rested flat against the granite doorposts, his senses running both outward toward the misty courtyard and downward into the deep foundation strata where his stored Dominion force hummed at twelve hundred and seventy points.
In the corridor between the outer gates and the buried stair, forty hand-slates were laid out along the pine plank work-tables like drying roof tiles in a tiler’s shed.
Edren Dene sat on an upturned nail keg near the center table, his thick miner’s spectacles perched low on his nose, holding a cracked hand-slate in his calloused fingers. Opposite him stood Gavrel the Cooper, leaning heavily on his ash cane, his grey beard flecked with cedar ash. Between them sat two Crown artillerymen from the third siege battery—young men with soot-stained wool coats and the yellow brass badge of the royal gunners pinned to their collars.
The younger gunner, a private named Corbel who had lost two fingernails loading grape-canister into a twelve-pounder four days ago, reached into his tunic and pulled out a folded slip of blue dispatch paper.
