The white noise was not a sound.
It was the sensation of a thousand brass pins being driven into a surface that had no skin to bleed.
Every time the mortar shells thudded into the high ramparts above, the concussion tore through the limestone fractures of Noll’s left forearm and exploded directly into Core Chip Number Two. The little blue facet, mortared into the hollow between his artificial ribs, was the pivot upon which his whole existence swung. If the core down in the cistern was the furnace, this chip was the draft-flue that vented its heat into the six hundred pounds of dressed stone he had learned to call his body.
Now, under the crushing shear of the green-oak tie-beam, the draft-flue was choking on its own ash.
Through the fracture lines running down his left radius, Noll felt the mountain’s weight as an intimate, hateful pressure. It was forty tons of rain-soaked sod, crushed chimney brick, and century-old roof slate, all balanced on a fractured triangle of river limestone no wider than a carpenter’s hand. The limestone was weeping white dust. With every second that ticked away on the invisible clock in the cellar below, micro-fissures branched outward from the elbow joint, creeping upward toward the shoulder socket like frost spreading across a winter windowpane.
