The old king’s name still hung in the vaulted limestone dome overhead, pale and sharp as salt scraped from a cellar barrel, when the ninth door groaned.
It was a dry, deliberate sound—the creak of three-inch heart-oak straining against wrought-iron mortise pins that had been forged to hold a powder magazine, never a promise. Fine grey mortar dust sifted down from the arch at the northern curve of the Hall of Witness and settled across the empty seat of the small pine chair placed three paces before the threshold.
Inside the center of the sunken witness ring, Noll Vey felt the vibration travel up through the soles of his carved stone boots.
His boots were fused ankle-deep into the floor lock where the Hall had bound his stake—all one thousand one hundred and twenty points of stored claim credit held under public surety while the reckoning sat in session. The stone host body he wore had never been a sculptor’s triumph. Its nose was crooked where Ossa Flint’s chisel had followed the old break in his mortal cartilage; its shoulders carried the slightly round-backed stoop of a fifty-one-year-old road conjurer who had spent thirty winters sleeping under leaky wagon canvas; and the three brass buttons carved down the front of its stone coat were polished only because his right thumb kept rubbing them whenever the room grew quiet. Inside the hollow behind his breastbone, the blue facet of his second core chip hummed against the wider valley ring of his…
