Tessa Dene always hated speaking in rooms where the floor was cleaner than her boots.
When she stood up from the first row of the Mere municipal bench, a flake of dried yellow ditch-clay fell off her heel onto the swept limestone flags of the Hall of Witness. She didn’t brush it away. She tucked her salvage slate under her left arm, checked with her right thumb that her tax-exempt bread knife was seated snug in its leather loop at her hip, and walked down the three shallow steps to the witness rail.
Close up, Noll’s stone host body looked heavier and more worn than it did from the benches. Fine white mortar dust clung to the creases around his crooked stone nose and the carved lapels of his coat, and through the gap over his breastbone she could see the blue facet of his second core chip pulsing like a coal fanned by a steady bellows. Three paces to his left sat Hobb’s scullery chair before the bowed heart-oak of the ninth door, and at the base of the steps lay Bristle.
The blind rubble hound had its heavy slate chin resting on its front paws. Where its fourth leg should have been—the left rear paw that had been cracked off at the hock during the forest fire two nights ago—a neat binding of copper wire and lime-putty sealed the stump. Even without eyes, Bristle’s stone ears tracked Tessa’s footsteps by the scrape of her hobnails and the familiar…
