Falling, when one had no legs with which to land, was an intensely undignified business.
For the past three weeks, Noll Vey had grown rather comfortable with the geometry of his new existence. At Seed rank, his world had been three damp rooms and a rat-chewed ledge; since Hobb’s soup pot had lifted him to Hearth rank, he owned five rooms of honest fieldstone, a dry cellar drain, a mirror passage, a nine-stone shield room, and a fuel-less stove that smelled perpetually of honey-barley buns. Below his cellar flagstones lay packed hill clay and the thirty-year-old char bed from which Sergeant Berr had climbed—a blind, muffled floor where Noll’s awareness normally stopped dead in wet gravel.
When Watchman Hew’s final recorded bell-stroke drained out of the clapperless dome in the yard, that blind floor vanished like a trapdoor dropped under a gallows.
The pyrite hum did not scatter into the mud. It plunged straight down through the hill’s spine like a plumb-line of cold blue iron, and because Noll had been leaning every ounce of his core-sight against the doorway threshold to listen to the names in the trench, the descending wave caught his awareness by the coat-tails and dragged him down with it.
