The air coming down through the cracked northern mine drift smelled of wet sleet, mud, and burnt sulfur from the silenced batteries—until the Last Guest breathed it in.
Through the blue facet of Core Chip Two in his chest, Noll Vey watched the released compulsion of the suspended siege charter gather along the vaulted ceiling of the Hall of Witness. To mortal eyes on the benches, it looked only like a faint, shimmering heat-haze above the lamps, the sort of shimmer that rises over a slate roof after an August shower. To Noll’s Dominion sight, it was a thick, braided ribbon of tarnished silver and dried sealing-wax light: the shed outer skin of ten thousand barked assault orders, forced-march tallies, and artillery fire-tables that Master Serit’s Great Seal had just stripped of their legal force.
At the scarlet hazard line, the Last Guest tilted its small pale head back, parted its narrow lips, and drank that ribbon straight out of the air.
There was no roar of wind and no theatrical thunderclap. Instead, there was a low, dry sound like a bale of old parchment pages being riffled by a thumb, followed by the soft, satisfied clink of pewter plates settling onto a mahogany sideboard.
