For twelve minutes, while Kip, Bess, and Fennik crept down the thirty-foot mirror corridor with their willow bucklers overlapping like tortoise shells and their boots feeling for trap-springs that were not there, Noll Vey held his stone breath and watched the public slate.
Not a single letter stirred.
When Kip reached the mitered tin join where Doss had barked his nose the afternoon before, the tall fuller’s lad halted his squad with a raised fist, studied his own split reflection in the scoured metal, and whispered to Bess that the knight’s mirror was trying to draw their shield-hand out of line. Still the slate stayed dark. When Fennik spotted the first hemp latch-cord running through its stone groove in the dry-stone maze and called out the counterweight sandbag overhead as though he had just uncovered an assassin’s crossbow, the white chalk on the Grand Hall wall sat as cold and quiet as limestone in a well.
RANK HEARTH NO CLAIM ENTERED ACTIVE DEBTS ZERO
Even when the second and third town crews followed—six pot-helmed lads who marched through the shifting partitions with their jaws set like iron wedges, ducked under Tessa’s twelve-pound oak bars with grunts of martial triumph, and solemnly selected three mason’s wedges from the pine salvage chest before buying eighteen of Hobb’s honey-buns at the exit arch—the ledger never so much as twitched.
