Prit brushed a flake of white lime mortar from the cuff of his moth-eaten velvet coat, tucked the red hazard chalk stub neatly into the third loop of his leather pouch—right behind the white filing chalk and the grey audit chalk—and stepped up to the scarlet line on the flagstones.
His knee-joints gave a dry, double click in the hush.
In sixty-eight years of keeping books for dungeon cores across the realm of Orren, Prit had stood before tax-farmers with iron sledges, ducal bailiffs with wagon-hooks, and weeping heirs with torches in their fists. None of them had ever looked quite like the thing standing three inches on the far side of his red chalk mark. Up close, the Last Guest did not merely wear pewter place settings; the metal was rooted into the weave of its dark coat the way barnacles root into river pilings. Every tarnished fork and dented soup plate carried the faint, greasy thumbprint of some real soldier or carter who had eaten camp rations in the valley during the past nine days.
And the knife in its right hand was four feet of unpolished, pig-iron appetite. The air within a yard of the edge tasted like an empty stomach on the third day of a winter march.
