Ossa Flint reached the bottom step of the witness well, shielding her scarred cheek from the sputtering oath-silver glare with one leather sleeve while her other hand hefted the foot-long iron calibration key.
“Don’t let the boy pull the pin yet!” Ossa shouted up toward the rail, her voice cutting beneath the loud, glorious muddle of miners and soldiers reading their pocket tallies across the tiers. “If we break the second anchor while all those stored revisions are backed up in the coil, the charge won’t just die in the brass! It will dump straight out through the ground wires into the valley floor!”
Noll Vey felt the truth of her warning through his Dominion ring before the echo left the vault.
The valley-wide ledger circle he had held since rising to the fifth rank stretched far beyond the fort’s thick curtain walls—down the rutted timber road, past the blackened stumps of the border woods, around the iron market well in Mere’s square, and deep into the flooded lower drifts of the silver-iron mine. Through that stone web, Noll could feel the copper grounding straps Vane’s sappers had staked into the hillside ditches when they hauled the portable register up from the Survey House vault. The brass chassis at Vane’s knees was brimming with thirty years of pruned accounts and the fresh overwrite wave Vane was trying to force into the Hall. If Cale and Ossa cracked Collar Anchor 2 right now without an anchor outside to hold the valley’s…
