The Grand Hall was colder than the ditch.
Tessa Dene wiped a smear of grey soot from her cheek with the back of her wrist, leaving a smudge of grease along her jaw. Her work boots sounded loud and clumsy on the high gallery flags, each step echoing off the unplastered limestone walls like an iron hammer on a cold anvil.
During the five months Noll had held the Dominion rank, the Grand Hall had possessed an invisible, stubborn breath. It was never warm—Noll was too cheap with his points to waste honest heat on an empty corridor—but the air had always carried the faint, dry resonance of a tightened drumhead. You could tell where the corners were by the sound of your own boots; you could feel the draft from the kitchen flue three rooms away because the stone seemed to lean toward the smell of bacon.
Now the hall was just a quarry cave with rafters.
The high north wall was dark grey, the mortar joints between the header blocks pale and dry. Six feet above the flags, set into a square recess where an old watch-captain’s lantern hook had once hung, sat Noll’s mother-stone.
It was no larger than a duck’s egg, rough-faceted, the blue of river slate after the sun has baked the water out of the silt. There was no luminescence in its core. No pulse of azure light flickered across the quartz edges; no hum of acoustic resonance stirred the fine dust clinging to…
