Dusk brought the smell of wet wool and fried bacon through the gallery vent.
High in the north wall, Noll sat in his quiet bed of lime mortar, listening to the gallery floorboards creak under familiar boots. Across the three winter months since the bells had rung, he had learned to tell who was climbing the stairs before they reached the second landing: Hobb had the heavy, dragging shuffle of a man whose right heel had been broken by a timber log; Sella Rusk walked with the brisk, light tap of a deer hunter testing the moss; and Cale came with a hurried, scuffling trot that was always accompanied by the dry clatter of inkpots inside his leather satchel.
Tonight there were two of them: Cale and Tessa.
A stool scraped across the flagstones, followed by the dull thunk of Cale’s cedar ledger box being set down on the work bench right beneath the copper speaking tube.
“Noll,” Tessa’s voice came through the pipe, slightly hoarse from a long afternoon in the cold courtyard. “You awake in there?”
Noll did not have the force to ring his crystal like a bell, but he had spent ninety days practicing with the single grain of white filing chalk on his granite shelf. Gathering a tiny thread of tension in his lower cleavage plane, he nudged the white speck a sixteenth of an inch along its groove.
