The limestone floor beneath Noll Vey’s right stone boot did not yield.
It was ancient, water-cut bedrock, laid down ten thousand years before the first founding duke hammered an iron marker into the soil of Orren. But as Noll shifted his weight into the aisle between the fallen benches, every joint in his stone body screamed with calcified friction. His left shoulder socket, torn open to the core by the falling ceiling timber, was a crater of raw, sizzling slate that sprayed tiny sparks of cold blue light against his granite collarbone.
He had no points left in the ledger to buy an illusion.
The Dominion reserve—the one thousand one hundred and twenty points that had taken nine weeks of ditch-digging, well-clearing, and honest market agreements to build—was locked entirely into the ninth room’s maturity pool. He could not summon a phantom wall of iron. He could not throw a veil of stage smoke over Vane’s shivering body, and he could not command the Last Guest to halt as if it were a hired actor waiting in the wings for his entrance line.
Clause Three was not an incantation. It was an iron legal constraint:
Answers only to a true host who keeps his room.
