Through six feet of copper pipe, the world returned to Noll Vey in the small, honest currency of boots, hemp, and woodsmoke.
He could not see the Grand Hall. He could not feel the temperature of the air thirty feet below his wall socket, nor could he tell whether the sun had slipped behind the western ridge. But the copper bell Tessa had mortared into the limestone caught every sound on the gallery floor and delivered it straight into his mineral ear with the dry, unvarnished clarity of an empty rain barrel.
He heard the heavy, rhythmic scraping of timber on flagstones as Eske and Sella Rusk hauled a pair of pine sawhorses across from the old carpenter’s bay.
“Lift the shoulders first,” Tessa’s voice came through the pipe, slightly muffled as she moved around the work bench. “Watch the left socket, Sella. The mortar in the joint is dry, but if you twist it, the alignment pin will shear.”
“I have carried dead steers out of the snow that weighed more than this,” Sella grunted, her boots slipping half an inch in the lime dust before catching purchase. “Though a steer doesn’t have a nose made of carved basalt. Eske, take the knees.”
