The granite collars did not snap shut with a theatrical clang. They rose out of the floor flags like cold dough pushing through an iron grating, sliding upward along the rough chisel marks of Noll Vey’s limestone ankles until the bevel met the flare of his calves. Then the stone hardened, knit with the bedrock beneath, and locked him to the witness circle.
Noll pulled against the restraint by habit. He did not expect to break the granite; he simply reached with his mind, the way he had done for seven months whenever a wall took a pickax or a ceiling timber groaned under wet snow. He sought the mortar lines running down into the deep magazine, the cool seep of the cistern channels, the resonant skin of the hill fort that had answered his breathing since the night Varn cracked his skull on the cellar seal.
Nothing answered.
The conduit was cut. His awareness was hemmed in, driven back from the ramparts, stripped of the outer gates and the speaking flues, and squeezed entirely into the rough-hewn limestone torso standing at the iron rail. For the duration of the Public Reckoning, he was not the fort. He was five feet and nine inches of quarried grey block, mortared joints, and one blue core chip ticking in his hollow breastbone like a pocket watch dropped into an empty porridge kettle.
