Noll Vey had spent thirty-odd years of his mortal life around bells of every dishonest variety.
He had owned a brass dinner-gong in Greyford with a lead slug soldered inside the rim so it sounded like cathedral bronze when struck behind a velvet curtain. He had rigged tiny silver sleigh-bells to the ankles of a trained ferret in Osterbridge so country squires would swear they heard fairies dancing under the floorboards. Once, during a particularly lean winter along the Salt Road, he had even rented a cracked parish church bell from a deaf sexton and charged two pence a head to let farmers touch what he called the Relic of Saintophor’s Anvil.
None of those bells had ever made his own stone ache before anyone struck it.
Pressing his sight hard against the damp lime mortar of the inner doorway arch—the farthest inch his Hearth-rank reach allowed him to lean toward the open yard—Noll stared through the morning mist at the dark grey-blue dome lying on its flank in the mud trench. The east window’s blue-amber beam still rested squarely on the carved rim, illuminating the three concentric witness grooves and the ragged grey stump inside the hollow crown where the stone tongue had snapped off.
