The basalt thumb made a dry, rasping sound as Noll dragged it across the center of his palm.
It was not the sound of skin on skin. There was no warmth in it, no pliant give of flesh or pulse of blood beneath the surface. It was rock abrading rock, coarse river sand caught in lime mortar rubbing against the smoothed hollow of basalt. Yet in the dull, fading circuit of his nerves, a faint impression remained—a dim memory of pressure traveling up the stone arm to the blue core chip nestled behind his carved ribs.
The hollow was less than a quarter of an inch deep, but its edges were rounded and distinct.
Four days. That was all the body had lived. Four days since the twelve-hour windfall in the deep cellar had forced river silt and volcanic stone to stand upright, taking the rough shape of a fifty-one-year-old traveling showman who had died in the cold dirt over fourteen silver coins.
In those four days, the palm had done more ordinary work than Noll Vey had managed in ten years of wandering the post roads.
He traced the rim of the depression again. The circular curve came from Hobb’s battered tin broth mug, its rim dented from three campaigns, pressed into the stone fingers morning after morning while the cook ladled out split-pea porridge. The straight, shallow notch beside it had been pressed by the cedar frame of Prit’s audit slate during the midnight tallies in the lower…
