The tremor traveled upward through seventy feet of limestone, vibrating in the marrow of Noll’s stone boots.
It was not the blind, mechanical concussion of a mortar strike. It had an intent behind it, a cold, questioning recoil that rippled through the blue lines of the Dominion ledger like a plucked harp string.
Beside him on the terrace, Tessa caught his good right forearm. Her grip was tight, her knuckles pressing into the grey rock. “Did you feel that?”
“I felt it,” Noll said. He kept his eyes fixed on the lane below, where sixty-odd Crown soldiers were seated in rows along the drystone wall, their hands cupped around Hobb’s wooden broth bowls. “The ninth room just reached out toward them. It smelled the meat, Tessa. It smelled eighty-four human beings walking across the threshold.”
“And?”
“And it couldn’t find a tooth-hold,” Noll murmured.
The wonder of it was still settling into his thoughts. Through his sensory link to the hill’s deep cistern, he had tracked the invisible reach of Debt D-10 as it coiled up through the foundation channels. The hunger behind the ninth door was immense, vast as a winter blizzard, calibrated by the core’s protective lie to seek out and consume every particle of the Crown force that had come to tear the fort apart. By all the brutal arithmetic of the dungeon ledger, those sixty men in the courtyard should have been marked as prey. They wore the King’s wool; their boots had marched from the…
