The pull did not feel like rope or chain. It felt like cold iron teeth clamped directly onto the center of Noll Vey’s blue claim-core, dragging downward with the slow, hydraulic violence of an overloaded mine cage whose brakes had sheared away.
Noll’s stone head struck the seasoned oak of the witness rail with a hollow, wooden thud.
Around him, the Hall of Witness tilted on its side. His basalt knees were ground into the mortar seams between the flagstones, throwing up flakes of grey grit that sifted down into the floor grating. His remaining right stone hand—the basalt fingers carved with such careful domestic seams by Ossa Flint during the Bastion days—hooked over the timber rail, stone knuckles whitening under a strain that set tiny fracture lines running up his forearm.
“Noll!” Tessa was beside him, her wool sleeve rough against his neck as both her hands seized his stone shoulder, trying to haul his bulk back from the lip of the ring. “Don’t lean into it! Fight the draft!”
“Can’t... fight... gravity, girl,” Noll ground out through locked stone jaws.
His acoustic speaking tubes along the gallery ribs were whistling with a thin, reedy squeal like wind tearing through a broken window sash. Through his foundation senses—the deep limestone roots he had spent months anchoring into the bedrock above Mere—he felt where the cable ran.
