Sound did not come through ears.
For an hour that had no minutes in it, Noll had floated in the cold mineral quiet of the wall, wrapped in the indifference of forty feet of limestone. He had no hands to rub his eyes, no ribs to expand with breath, no pulse to mark the passage of the afternoon. He was simply a pattern of awareness locked inside a fist-sized lattice of quartz and river silt, as still and unmoving as a fossil shell in a sea-cliff.
Then, from somewhere impossibly close, a vibration touched the outer crust of his stone.
It was not the high, ringing chime of an auditor’s silver bell. It was a dull, hollow scrape—the dry friction of a flared copper rim being jammed into an iron bracket, followed by the muffled, rhythmic thump of a woman’s boots shifting on a wooden floor.
Then came the voice.
It arrived down the copper barrel like water trickling through an old lead pump: metallic, raspy, and thoroughly annoyed.
“Noll,” the voice said.
He felt the syllables strike the mineral face. The acoustic shock was microscopic—a thousandth of the force he had once used to throw his voice across the eight-thousand-man siege camp—yet in the absolute deadness of the unranked core, it felt like an iron punch on an anvil.
