Prit adjusted his iron knee-guards and kept his chalk hand steady against the cedar frame of his slate.
In seventy-four years of service across seven different masters, the little bone steward had seen four cores shatter under debt, one boil away under royal tax-steam, and one split by cold iron wedges when a territorial duke grew tired of paying an orchard lease. Every death had been loud. Cores died with the shriek of green timber breaking under an avalanche, or with the greasy, chemical reek of ozone and boiling lead that filled the room when an audit collar shorted out its ground wire.
They did not die in silence. Silence was the luxury of living things that had finished their supper and put their boots by the hearth.
Down in the well of the Hall of Witness, the silence was so dense that Prit could hear the faint, dry tick of his own finger bones rubbing together inside his wool mittens.
The ceiling glyphs were gone. Above the dark granite rim, the high arch of the ninth door—the doorway Noll had chalked in red paste during the panic of the first siege morning—was shuddering.
Prit watched through his hollow eye-sockets as the vast, shadowy perspective behind that arch began to buckle. For nine days, eight thousand soldiers looking up from the valley ditch had believed an infinite banquet hall lay beyond that threshold: black trestle tables groaning under roasted iron, silver flagons brimmed with ditch water, and a high seat…
