The ninth door had not swung upon iron hinges. It had unfolded like a black drop-cloth pulled loose from the rafters of a burned theater, revealing a gallery that had no business existing behind six feet of solid hillside limestone.
Noll Vey kept his remaining right hand pressed flat against the cold top of the witness rail and tried to ignore the white-hot static howling out of his broken left shoulder. Chipped quarry stone and pale lime mortar littered the flags at his boots, still warm from the kitchen beam that had taken his other arm when Sen went back for Luma’s split core. Through the shallow cup-mark carved into his stone palm, he felt the bedrock of the Hall of Witness shuddering like an overloaded wagon axle.
Beyond the split inner wall, the black banquet tables stretched away into a folded dark that smelled of cold tallow, wet wool, and old iron pay-chests. Beneath every polished ebony board, hinged jaws of dark wood opened and closed with a dry, rhythmic clicking—clack, clack, clack—like a hundred tally-clerks snapping their cases shut at the close of market.
And at the threshold of that dark stood the Last Guest.
It was taller than Sergeant Berr by a head, draped in a long, shifting coat stitched together from tarnished pewter plates, dented camp spoons, salt cellars, and tin ration cups that chimed softly against one another whenever the draft moved. Its face was small and smooth as river chalk, almost childlike in its…
