The silence in the Hall of Witness was different from any stillness Noll Vey had heard since the debt collector Varn drove an iron blade into his ribs on the ruined hill above Mere.
It was not the cold, waiting quiet of a theater before the curtain rose. It was the heavy, settling hush of a mine drift after the charges have fired and the dust has drifted to the sump, when every man in the timber gallery holds his breath to learn whether the ceiling will stay where the wedges pinned it.
Noll stood at the center of the witness rail.
His left shoulder was still a jagged stub of grey basalt and cured mortar, sheared off during the noon barrage when the Crown twelve-pounder threw a casing into the nursery stair. His right hand remained whole, its thick stone fingers clamped to the native limestone lip of the rail. Yet inside his chest cavity, where the blue claim-core pulsed within its rib-cage of mortared granite, the choking iron torque that had dragged at his marrow since midwinter was gone.
The red collar core seal had flaked into harmless ash. Down on the bottom riser of the Old Royal Seat, Sergeant Berr’s sword had shattered the third oath-silver anchor into slag.
