The cold did not fall from the roof timbers; it came up through the mountain marrow like well-water seeping through an unsealed cellar floor.
From his vantage in the high north wall, where the blue mother-stone sat in its bed of damp lime mortar, Noll felt the boundaries of his awareness snapping like dry twine. For five months, the Dominion rank had stretched his senses out across three miles of Mere valley. He had felt the scrape of wagon tires over the river cobbles, the weight of winter hay being forked into the Survey barns, the sudden flare of heat when a blacksmith threw green coal onto an anvil.
Now those outer threads were shriveling, retracting along the old culvert lines and road gutters toward the hill fort’s inner ring. The eastern gallery went blind first, the pale grey silhouette of the window bays dissolving into flat, featureless shadow. Then the cellar arches fell silent, their acoustic resonance collapsing as the lie-bought air thinned and vanished from the stone pipes.
Down on the floor of the Grand Hall, his one-armed basalt host body was stiffening.
Noll felt the drag of it in his basalt knees, a thick, greasy sluggishness that turned every hinge into rusted scrap. His single right hand still rested on the oak rail beside the seated chip, its fingers curled around the edge of the groove. Five points of Dominion credit remained in the ceiling glyphs, flickering like the last embers in a coal grate before the…
