The stairs leading up from the Hall of Witness were never designed for a body made of six hundred pounds of lime and crushed granite.
Each step was nine inches of damp river slate, mortared into the living rock seventy years ago by the royal sappers who had built the original hill fort. When Noll took the first three treads at a lurching run, the stone under his boots groaned in complaint. Mortar dust puffed out around his iron-shod heels, hanging in grey plumes in the narrow, stair-vaulted gloom. Behind him, Tessa’s leather soles slapped the flags with a quick, light rhythm, her breathing already ragged from the climb.
“Don’t lean left!” she shouted up the stairwell, her voice bouncing between the sweating limestone walls. “The outside riser is hollowed out where the drainage culvert runs beneath it! If you punch a foot through that arch, I’ll have to dig you out with a pry-bar!”
“I’m not leaning!” Noll shouted back, though his left knee joint gave a dry, metallic screech with every stride.
Deep inside his stone breastbone, nestled behind the crude breastplate of dressed river cobbles he had mortared together in the cellar, Core Chip Number Two burned with a cold, steady blue light. It was his anchor. If the stone body was a puppet, the chip was the lead weight that kept the strings from tangling in the wind. Through that tiny facet of blue crystal, he could feel the pulse of the entire hill—and right now…
