The clapper of the nine-minute evacuation bell still hung plumb inside its bronze skirt up in the north arch, warm from its last stroke and smelling faintly of tallow grease. Below it, the inner corridors of the fort had gone empty in the queer, hollow way a theater goes empty when the house doors latch behind the latecomers and only the broom-crew remains to count the bent tin tokens under the benches.
Noll Vey knelt on one basalt knee at the inner curve of the witness rail, his remaining right stone hand resting palm-down against the red-chalked oak bar. His left shoulder ended in the rough, unmortared fracture where the noon cannon-shock had sheared the basalt away above Sen’s head. Inside the hollow recess of his stone chest, the second blue core chip pulsed in slow, cold unison with his older self set high in the north wall’s lime socket. One thousand one hundred and twenty points of staked Dominion force still hummed between them—enough power to hold the cracked corbel steady over Lord Auditor Orin Vane’s bare head, enough to keep the Outer Threshold Grace Window open across the main doorway for a few minutes more, and not one spark of it his to keep once his fingers lifted the chip from his ribs.
