The amber warning line along the stone rim pulsed like a hot coal raked out onto a hearth flag.
Up in the gallery, the hopeful murmur that had greeted Clerk Cale’s canal precedent died in the delegates’ throats. At the lectern, Cale leaned over the railing, his spectacles slipping down the bridge of his nose as a second, deeper line of chiseled script surfaced in the limestone directly beneath his shoes.
CHARTER IS FORM. SHARED WILL TO CONQUER IS SUBSTANCE.
In the sunken center of the witness ring, Noll Vey felt the truth of that inscription before he even finished reading the letters.
Because he was bound at Dominion rank to the valley’s bedrock—and because the second core chip inside his stone chest hummed on the same frequency as the cellar behind the ninth door—he could feel what was pressing against the oak planks. It was not merely hungry for wax seals and brass ledger plates. Out on the damp hillsides around Mere, eight thousand men were still standing in trench lines behind sharpened stakes. Three artillery batteries on the northern ridge still had powder kegs stacked beside their mortars. Sentries still sighted crossbows along the lower road.
Every time a captain looked up at the fort ramparts and calculated where a breach could be blown, or a sergeant told his squad to keep their matches dry for the afternoon assault, a thin, taut thread of living intent ran down through the mud into the roots of the hill—and the…
