Through Core Chip Number Two embedded in his granite chest, Noll Vey saw the world with the creature’s eyes.
It was not an image made of sunlight, grass, and muddy ditches. It was a vast, vibrating lattice of cold silver and taut catgut, stretching across five leagues of valley from the high border crags down to the timber docks of Mere.
Every living man in the siege army was a knot in the netting.
A private of the line was a faint, trembling thread of three copper groats a week and the fear of eight lashes for sleeping on watch. A corporal was two threads, weighted with a bronze whistle and the responsibility for six pairs of dry boots. But the officers—the lieutenants, the company captains, the battery chiefs—were heavy, humming cables of woven wire, vibrating with the authority of signed parchment, the habit of obedience, and the King’s Great Seal.
And all those thousands of threads did not run to the tents on the hillside.
They ran like drawn wire through the bedrock of the mountain, funneled down through the old mine drift, and terminated in a single, blazing junction box in the center of the Hall of Witness.
