Nobody on the lower benches breathed while Master Serit weighed the knock.
The pine chair sitting three paces before the ninth door was an ordinary kitchen chair from Hobb’s scullery—ash rungs, a rush-woven seat mended twice with tarred twine, and one back leg shimmed with a folded scrap of leather so it wouldn’t wobble on uneven flags. Tessa had carried it down at dawn because the Hall of Witness required a physical seat for every party summoned on the docket, and bringing down a bench large enough for what lived behind the ninth door would have meant dismantling the timber mill.
Behind the bowed heart-oak panels, the vast silhouette shifted again. Through his Dominion bond, Noll felt the sheer, compressed density of the thing coiled inside the old salt cellar: eight days of cold camp-fire dread from eight thousand soldiers, eight days of dry-mouthed counting on the fort ramparts, all poured into the five-clause mold he had struck at dawn. Its knees were drawn up to its chin behind the stone; its shoulders brushed the vaulted ceiling sixteen feet up; and around it, black banquet tables that had never been sawn from any forest in Orren breathed in slow, hungry unison.
