The sound coming from the lower drainage tunnels was not the clean, sharp snap of timber taking a sudden weight. It was the low, grinding groan of dressed stone sliding against wet bedrock, three stories below the cellar flags.
Lime dust drifted down from the ceiling vaults in a thin, continuous veil, dusting the shoulders of the disarmed soldiers on the benches until their green coats looked frosted with rime. High above the ring, the acoustic speaking tubes vibrated with a reedy hum that smelled of hot brass and scorched horsehair. Every mortar joint across the western wall of the Hall of Witness was weeping fine yellow sand where the hill’s ancient joints were being twisted by the downward draw of Collar Anchor 3.
Noll Vey kept both stone knees planted in the lime grit before the rail, his right hand locked around the seasoned timber so hard that grey basalt powder trickled from between his knuckles.
“Ossa!” Noll coughed out, his mortar-seam mouth spitting tiny blue embers that charred the rail’s red-chalked face. “The conduit... where does it seat?”
Down in the well, Ossa Flint did not look up from the floor grating. Her leather apron was smeared with soot and wet lime slurry, and her single glass lens hung by its greasy hemp string against her collarbone, forgotten. She had both bare hands thrust through the iron bars of the grating beneath the dead register pedestal, her thick fingers clamped around the heavy copper-jacketed bus bar where it…
